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For 77 minutes on the evening of January 25, 1990, Avianca Flight 52 circles in holding patterns off the US East Coast. During that time it burns the fuel that was meant for an alternate airport. When the aircraft is finally cleared to approach, the crew knows exactly where it stands. Air traffic control does not. An example of the Team Principle of Communication.
Three Holding Patterns
Situation
The Boeing 707 of Colombian airline Avianca is flying from Bogotá via Medellín to New York, bound for John F. Kennedy Airport. There are 158 people on board: 149 passengers and 9 crew members. In the cockpit are Captain Laureano Caviedes, First Officer Mauricio Klotz and Flight Engineer Matías Moyano. The first officer handles the radio communications. The weather on the East Coast is bad. The aircraft is put into a holding pattern three times: for 19 minutes, then 29 minutes, then another 29 minutes.
Connection to the team principle
The Team Principle of Communication states: a team knows only what its members tell one another. During these hours, the crew and the controllers are a team with a shared task: landing this aircraft safely. But the knowledge is unevenly distributed. Only the cockpit can see the fuel gauge. Only air traffic control can see the traffic situation. With every holding pattern, the gap grows between what one side knows and what the other side assumes.
“Priority” Is Not “Emergency”
Situation
At around 8:46 p.m., the first officer reports that they can hold for only about five more minutes and can no longer reach the alternate airport. He asks for “priority.” The word “emergency” is never said to air traffic control. The controllers later testified that they respond immediately only to “Mayday,” “Pan-pan” or “Emergency.” Asking for priority was not carelessness: Boeing and Avianca documents recommended exactly that when fuel was low.
Connection to the team principle
The crew did say something. From their point of view, they had reported the situation, and in exactly the way they had been trained to. What reached the controllers was a request, not an alarm. The same word carried different weight at each end of the radio link. For the team principle, this means: what counts as said is not what the speaker means but what the listener understands. Where safety is at stake, a team needs words that trigger the same response in everyone.
The Handoff
Situation
The aircraft is handed off to the next control facility. In the process, the statement about the alternate airport is lost. The controller handing off the flight said he had not heard it. The controllers guiding the approach treat Flight 52 like any other aircraft in the arrival sequence.
Connection to the team principle
Knowledge is tied to people. When the person changes, the knowledge has to be passed on explicitly; otherwise the next person starts from zero. Team research is familiar with this pattern: in a 2009 meta-analysis of 72 studies, Jessica R. Mesmer-Magnus and Leslie A. DeChurch showed that information sharing is linked to better team performance – and that teams share less in exactly those situations where knowledge is unevenly distributed and they need the exchange most. The study is not about aviation, but it describes what happens here.
In the Cockpit, It Is Said Out Loud
Situation
At 9:23 p.m., on its first approach, the aircraft runs into wind shear. It descends to about 250 feet, roughly two miles short of the runway, and has to go around. Afterward, the captain repeatedly instructs the first officer to declare an emergency to air traffic control and asks whether he has done so. The message to the controllers still does not include the word “emergency.”
Connection to the team principle
Inside the cockpit, the knowledge is now fully shared. All three men know that the fuel is running out, and the captain says it out loud. But the team’s boundary does not run along the cockpit door. On the last stretch, from the microphone to the controller, that one word does not get through. Why that is cannot be said with certainty from the outside. Only the result is certain: an instruction to “tell them” is not carried out until the others know.
Four Engines, No Fuel
Situation
At 9:34 p.m., all four engines fail from fuel exhaustion. The aircraft crashes at Cove Neck on Long Island, about 20 miles from the airport. Seventy-three people die, 85 survive. The US National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) cites as the cause the crew’s failure to manage the fuel load adequately and to communicate an emergency fuel situation to air traffic control. Among the contributing factors, it lists inadequate traffic flow management by the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) and the lack of standardized terminology for minimum and emergency fuel. It recommends a standardized glossary.
Connection to the team principle
The report does not lay the blame on a single person, and for teams, too, that is the right reading. Here an entire system allowed a vital word to have two meanings. The board’s recommendation is the team principle in bureaucratic language: agree together on what your words mean.
Key takeaways
Key Lessons
- Agree on fixed words for emergencies. Your team must know which word makes everyone drop everything – and that “it would be good if” is not that word.
- Say it in the recipient’s terms. Don’t ask yourself “Did I mention it?” but “Did they understand how serious it is?”
- Secure every handoff. Shift changes, vacation coverage, project handovers: the critical points must be stated explicitly and confirmed.
- If you think a situation is urgent, say so plainly. Politeness must not obscure urgency.
- As a leader, check whether the message got through – with the recipient, not the messenger.
Summary
On Avianca Flight 52, the engines did not fail because of a defect but because the fuel ran out. The crew knew the fuel was running out, and they reported it – with a word that did not signal an emergency to the controllers. At a handoff, another piece of the information was lost. Here the Team Principle of Communication shows itself through failure: a team knows only what its members tell one another, and only what the other person understands the same way has really been said.