A downdraft from a strong storm caused the AeroMexico crash at General Guadalupe Victoria International airport aka. Durango International Airport. The most severe storms, including supercells, have strong vertical drafts and occur in the most unstable atmospheres. An aircraft is most vulnerable just after leaving the ground after a take-off which is when the AeroMexico crash happened. Aircraft need speed to fly. The higher the speed, the more lift is generated by the wing. A downward traveling microburst can easily overpower the lift so the aircraft momently stopped flying and had insufficient altitude to recover and generate more lift.
The good part was no one was killed. The bad part was the crash.
The Enbraer 190 needs 6,890 feet of runway to take off. The runway at Durango is 9,514 feet so the runway was plenty long enough but it appears the aircraft was in the air too soon so the speed was a bit slower than it could have been. It also scraped a wing on the runway prior to lift off so it should not have been put in the air by the pilot or pilots. They probably didn’t see the wing scrape, it’s not in their normal field of vision, so they continued to attempt to fly when they should have immediately put the plane down on the runway and hit the brakes.
The aircraft was probably heavily loaded which means it would have needed more speed on the ground to begin flying. It had either 100 or 114 seats. There were 99 passengers and four crew. It’s a crash that shouldn’t have happened but only the pilot in command could have done things different. Too late for that now. No one died but two are critical. Wish them the best.
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