On New Year's Day, 1985, a Boeing 727 en route from Asuncion to La Paz crashed near the peak of Illimani, a mountain in the Cordillera Oriental subrange of the Andes. You can read more about that here:
Eastern Air Lines Flight 980
At 19,600 feet above sea level, the impact point remains the highest and one of the most remote airplane crash sites in the world. Due to the remoteness of the location, the airplane's wreckage wasn't found until more than 20 years after the crash, and neither the flight data recorder nor the remains of the passengers and crew have been recovered. The airplane seemed to be healthy when the crew last checked in with Bolivian air traffic controllers, and it seems the crash was a controlled flight into terrain due to poor visibility in the region on the day of the crash and spatial disorientation on the part of the crew. There are few places on Earth where the topography of Earth challenges pilots at 20,000 feet, but the Andes range is one of them, and it seems the ship's, crew's, and passengers' luck ran out as they wandered through a pass in the wrong direction in low visibility.
Besides the height of the crash site, flight 980 is notable for being the first fatal aviation accident of 1985. It was a harbinger of something wicked on its way. 1985 turned out to be the most horrific year in the history of civil air transport to date. Over 2,000 passengers and crew would be lost in aviation incidents, including the worst single-airplane accident ever and the worst terrorist bombing of a single airplane. Something had to change, and over the last three decades it has. The crash of an Asiana 777 last summer was the first fatal accident for an airplane that has been in service for 18 years and the first on US soil in four years. There will always be risk in slipping the surly bonds of Earth, but the management of this risk over the history of aviation is one of the greatest success stories of modern engineering. Thank goodness 2014 is unlikely to be much like 1985.
