Football community rallies behind Brazilian club

British Aerospace, which is now known as BAE Systems, says that the first 146-model plane took off in 1981 and that just under 400 – including the successor Avro RJ – were built in total in the United Kingdom through 2003.

Six people were eventually rescued alive, but rescuers were forced to put operations on hold Monday night as weather conditions grounded helicopters said six people survived.

“The weather is hampering efforts”, said local fire official Misael Cadavid.

Victory in the final of the Copa Sudamericana would have been the greatest triumph in Chapecoense’s history and allowed the team to compete in next season’s Copa Libertadores, the most prestigious club competition on the continent.

Dressed in the club’s green colors, fans of Chapecoense, which was to play the cup’s first final match on Wednesday against Medellin’s Atletico Nacional, began to gather early in the day at the team’s Arena Conda stadium to grieve.

Long a minor team, Chapecoense had recently ascended to Brazil’s premier league.

Spanish team Real Madrid tweeted a picture of the squad holding a minute’s silence before training on Tuesday as a mark of respect to the victims, while FC Barcelona’s Denis Suarez also shared an image of his team paying their respects.

The team, from the small city of Chapeco, joined Brazil’s top-flight Serie A in 2014 for the first time since the 1970s and had been in the middle of a fairy tale season. “For our part, and forever, Chapecoense are champions of the 2016 Copa Sudamericana”.

Aside from members of the soccer team, journalists covering the club were also on board.

The four-engine jet had been used by two other airlines before being sold to Bolivian charter company Lamia, which operated the flight.

Emergency workers have found the black boxes with flight data and cockpit voice recordings from a plane that crashed in the Colombian mountains with a Brazilian football team on board, officials have said.

The flight had started in Bolivia.

Hans Weber, a longtime adviser to US aviation authorities, said the aircraft’s range deserves careful investigation.

It went down about 50 kilometers (30 miles) from Medellin, Colombia’s second largest city, in an area called Cerro Gordo.

Given the model of the plane and the fact that it was flying close to capacity, “I would be concerned that the pilots may have been cutting it too close”, Weber said. The only member of the team not killed (he wasn’t with the team because of an injury) was killed by a drunken driver two weeks after the plane crash. “The investigation is ongoing and we’re going to await the results”. They instead chose to take a commercial airline flight.

“The hours since we heard of the news have been bad”.

Fans of Chapecoense, the Brazilian football club enjoying a fairy tale season until nearly wiped out in a plane crash, wept outside the stadium today.

The final is played across two legs, with each team hosting one leg at their home stadium.

On social media, haunting last photos showed the smiling players boarding the flight to Colombia for their match with Atletico Nacional.

“The dream is over”, Plinio David de Nes Filho, chairman of the club’s board, told Brazil’s TV Globo. “The dream was over early this morning”.