Qualla: Sol Líneas Aéreas Flight 5428

Sol Líneas Aéreas Flight 5428: Introduction

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

It was meant to be the last, routine leg of a long day. On the evening of 18 May 2011, a Saab 340 lifted off from Neuquen carrying 22 people toward Comodoro Rivadavia, the final stop on a domestic hop that had already crossed half of Argentina without trouble. Aboard were ordinary travelers heading home, among them an infant. The flight would last only minutes. Somewhere over the dark Patagonian steppe, in a winter sky thick with ice, the aircraft came down between the villages of Los Menucos and Prahuaniyeu, and no one survived. It remains the deadliest accident in the Saab 340's history.

Sol Líneas Aéreas Flight 5428: The Last Leg

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Flight 5428 had begun far to the north, at Rosario, and had threaded its way south through Cordoba, Mendoza, and Neuquen, three stops handled without incident. At Neuquen, the twin-turboprop took off at 20:05 for the run to Comodoro Rivadavia, where nearly everyone aboard was bou...

Sol Líneas Aéreas Flight 5428: Ice in the Dark

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

At around 20:29, climbing toward its assigned altitude of 19,000 feet, the Saab ran into icing conditions and leveled off at 17,800 feet. For about nine minutes it held there as ice built on the airframe. When the crew began descending toward 14,000 feet in search of warmer air, ...

Sol Líneas Aéreas Flight 5428: What the Investigation Found

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Argentina's civil aviation accident board, the JIAAC, examined the wreckage and the recorders and published its final report in March 2015, confirming an earlier preliminary finding. The aircraft itself was sound; investigators found no technical defect. The icing, they concluded...

Sol Líneas Aéreas Flight 5428: A Place That Remembers

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The crash site lies in some of the loneliest country in Argentina, a high cold steppe where the wind rarely rests and the nearest settlements are small. For the families of the 22, the distance only deepened the grief; recovering their loved ones from such a place took time and e...