Mexicana de Aviación Flight 940, operated by Mexicana de Aviación, was a scheduled international flight from

Mexico City Mexico City ( es, link=no, Ciudad de México, ; abbr.: CDMX; Nahuatl: ''Altepetl Mexico'') is the capital and largest city of Mexico, and the most populous city in North America. One of the world's alpha cities, it is located in the Valley o ...

Puerto Vallarta Puerto Vallarta ( or simply Vallarta) is a Mexican beach resort city situated on the Pacific Ocean's Bahía de Banderas in the Mexican state of Jalisco. Puerto Vallarta is the second largest urban agglomeration in the state after the Guadala ...

Mazatlán Mazatlán () is a city in the Mexican state of Sinaloa. The city serves as the municipal seat for the surrounding ''municipio'', known as the Mazatlán Municipality. It is located at on the Pacific coast, across from the southernmost tip of ...

Los Angeles Los Angeles ( ; es, Los Ángeles, link=no , ), often referred to by its initials L.A., is the largest city in the state of California and the second most populous city in the United States after New York City, as well as one of the world' ...

on March 31, 1986, utilizing a Boeing 727-200 registered as XA-MEM, when the plane crashed into El Carbón, a mountain in the

Sierra Madre Occidental The Sierra Madre Occidental is a major mountain range system of the North American Cordillera, that runs northwest–southeast through northwestern and western Mexico, and along the Gulf of California. The Sierra Madre is part of the American C ...

mountain range northwest of Mexico City, killing everyone on board. With 167 deaths, the crash of Flight 940 is the deadliest aviation disaster ever to occur on Mexican soil, and the deadliest involving a Boeing 727.

Background

The aircraft involved was delivered to Mexicana in 1981 and was named "''Veracruz''". The plane was piloted by Captain Carlos Guadarrama Sistos, an experienced Mexican captain with over 15,000 hours of flying experience. The first officer was Philip L. Piaget Rhorer, and the flight engineer was Ángel Carlos Peñasco Espinoza. The crew of eight included five flight attendants. The wife of the captain, who was a retired flight attendant, and the captain's son and daughter were also among the 159 passengers on board. At 08:50 local time, the plane took off from

Benito Juárez International Airport Mexico City International Airport ( es, link=yes, Aeropuerto Internacional de la Ciudad de México, AICM); officially ''Aeropuerto Internacional Benito Juárez'' (Benito Juárez International Airport) is the main international airport serving ...

en route to

Los Angeles International Airport Los Angeles International Airport , commonly referred to as LAX (with each letter pronounced individually), is the primary international airport serving Los Angeles, California and its surrounding metropolitan area. LAX is located in the W ...

with scheduled stopovers in

and

. The plane carried 147 passengers (139 passengers and 8 crew members) from Mexico, 8 from France, 6 from the United States, 4 from Sweden, and 2 from Canada.

Crash

At 09:05, fifteen minutes after takeoff, an explosion rocked the fuselage. Captain Guadarrama and the crew in the cockpit, realizing that the plane was shaking too much, declared an emergency and asked to return to Benito Juárez International Airport for an emergency landing. The airport was prepared for the landing. However, the aircraft crashed into El Carbón mountain near the town of Maravatío,

Michoacán Michoacán, formally Michoacán de Ocampo (; Purépecha: ), officially the Free and Sovereign State of Michoacán de Ocampo ( es, Estado Libre y Soberano de Michoacán de Ocampo), is one of the 32 states which comprise the Federal Entities of ...

, broke in two and burst into flames. All 167 passengers and crew were killed upon impact. Among the dead were two film scouts for the horror film ''

Predator Predation is a biological interaction where one organism, the predator, kills and eats another organism, its prey. It is one of a family of common feeding behaviours that includes parasitism and micropredation (which usually do not kill th ...

''. Eyewitnesses reported details of the crash to authorities. The local police and the Mexican army were dispatched to the crash site.

Investigation

Initially, two Middle Eastern terrorist groups claimed responsibility for this crash, along with the bombing of TWA Flight 840, which occurred just two days later. An anonymous letter signed by those groups claimed that a suicide mission had sabotaged the plane in retaliation against the United States.Levi, Isaac A. (April 4, 1986)
Mexican jet pilots claim plane crash caused by explosion
'' Kentucky New Era'' (AP). However, sabotage was later dismissed as a cause of the crash. The investigations were carried out by the U.S.

National Transportation Safety Board The National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) is an independent U.S. government investigative agency responsible for civil transportation accident investigation. In this role, the NTSB investigates and reports on aviation accidents and incid ...

and Mexican aeronautical authorities, who found that the cause of the accident was that a LH main landing gear tire was filled with compressed air, instead of

nitrogen Nitrogen is the chemical element with the symbol N and atomic number 7. Nitrogen is a nonmetal and the lightest member of group 15 of the periodic table, often called the pnictogens. It is a common element in the universe, estimated at se ...

. In addition, the tire had some marks of overheating. The investigators later found that the overheating was caused by a malfunctioning brake on the landing gear.''

The Montreal Gazette The ''Montreal Gazette'', formerly titled ''The Gazette'', is the only English-language daily newspaper published in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. Three other daily English-language newspapers shuttered at various times during the second half of th ...

'' (AP), April 5, 1986.

Aftermath

Mexicana maintenance personnel were blamed for negligence in maintaining the 727 and for filling the tire with compressed air, instead of nitrogen. About a year after the crash, the U.S. FAA released an Airworthiness Directive requiring the use of dry nitrogen (or other gases shown to be inert) when filling the tires on braked wheels of most commercial airliners. The crash remains the deadliest airline disaster in Mexican historyFields, Dana (May 23, 1986)
Explosion, fire preceded plane crash that killed 167
'' Nashua Telegraph'' ( AP). and is the world's deadliest air disaster involving the

Boeing 727 The Boeing 727 is an American narrow-body airliner that was developed and produced by Boeing Commercial Airplanes. After the heavy 707 quad-jet was introduced in 1958, Boeing addressed the demand for shorter flight lengths from smaller airpo ...

. The cause of the in-flight fire is believed to be the rupture of fuel lines by the exploding tire.

References

External links