Vuelo 505 Drummer Iván Fernández Dies of ALS at 45: He Gave Up the Sticks, Never His Seat

The line travelling fastest is Iván Fernández’s own: a farewell telling those who stay behind to stop worrying about nonsense and to live each day as if it were the last. It is a good line. But the more telling story about the drummer, who has died of ALS, sits in the words his bandmates chose to answer it. In this band, they wrote, we will always be five.

That reads like a standard tribute. It was also a plain description of how the Logroño rock band had already been working. When the disease stopped Fernández from playing, the group did not quietly move him to the past tense. Txiki Marín took over the drums on stage, with Fernández’s consent, and the band kept counting him in. Handing over the sticks without handing over the seat was a small, practical decision, and it said more than any press release could.

Fernández, known as “Butch”, was a founding member of Vuelo 505, formed in Logroño in 2013 and named after “Flight 505”, the Rolling Stones song from Aftermath. The band built its run album by album on the Spanish rock circuit: Turbulencias in 2015, No hay historias de fracaso in 2018 and Nada es tan urgente in 2023, with Pau Donés guesting on “Una casa en ruinas”.

The second half of his story is the one most obituaries give a single line. After his diagnosis, Fernández did not step out of view. In October 2022 he co-founded VencELA La Rioja, because, as Telecinco recounts, La Rioja was the only region in Spain without an association for people with ALS. The group set out to accompany patients and their families, advise them and make the disease visible. A drummer from a regional rock band is not a national star, but he had a stage, a name people in his city knew, and a reason to use both.

That work landed in a system that is still uneven. Spain’s ALS law was passed in October 2024 and only received its funding, 500 million euros, in November 2025. According to The Objective, the state support for patients who need round-the-clock care tops out at 9,850 euros a month, while the real cost runs between 14,000 and 18,000 euros, and Navarra, Aragón and Castilla-La Mancha had still not paid the aid. La Rioja is among the regions that top it up, to as much as 15,000 euros a month for the most dependent cases. No single association can claim that, but the region that had no patient group before 2022 is not the one lagging behind today.

Fernández died on September 25, aged 45. He leaves a daughter. Vuelo 505 said goodbye with a “fly high” and a line about him having gone back to his planet, adding that they already miss him. The songwriter Ander Shinova, quoted by Milenio, called him an example of life, strength, empathy and humanity.

His farewell asked the living to make the most of every day. His band had already shown what that looks like in practice. Whoever keeps time for Vuelo 505 from here on, the group has settled how many of them there are: five.

Tags: obituaries, ALS, Iván Fernández, VencELA Rioja, Vuelo 505