Like us on Facebook: www.facebook.com On a cold wet night on January 25, 1990, Avianca flight 052 a Boeing 707-300B with 149 passengers and 9 crew members has been circling around New York for over ninety minutes. The airplane had left José María Córdova International Airport four hours earlier. The poor weather at John F. Kennedy airport has forced many aircrafts including flight 52 to circle. Due to the poor conditions one runway is active and many airplanes are queing up to use it. As the pilots finally got the clearance to land strong windsheer and low visibility made it nearly impossible for the crew to land. As the tower ordered them to fly out and around the airport the plane's engines began to shut down due to the low fuel levels. When all four engines shut down the pilots coasted it into a hill side approximately fiteen miles away from John F. Kennedy Airport. Out of the 158 passengers and crew only 85 survived. The NTSB's report on the accident determined the cause as pilot error due to the crew never declaring a fuel emergency to air traffic control as per International Air Transport Association (IATA) guidelines. The crew asked for a "priority" landing which, because of language differences between English and Spanish, can be interpreted as an emergency to Spanish-speaking pilots but not to English-speaking air traffic controllers. This may have caused some confusion amongst the pilots when ATC confirmed their priority status. Some NTSB board members felt that <b>...</b>