Just minutes after takeoff, one of the engines reportedly caught on fire, forcing the pilot to try to return to the airport. The difficulty of turning over the hills and gaining the necessary height to return to the terminal area could be the reason for the fatal crash.

Witnesses said they saw smoke coming out of one engine and then the aircraft began to fall in a spiral until it crashed and they heard a loud explosion.

The aircraft fell near the banks of the Guacerique river at 2:05 in the afternoon; two minutes after taking off from Toncontin airport.

The plane received permission to take off from the Toncontin airport control tower and headed to San Pedro Sula. The twin-engine left the runway from north to south, and had taken off “with all the usual normality, without receiving any reports of failure or discrepancies from the pilot,” said Aeronautics.

Experts say that the aircraft can operate on one engine, because each engine has 374 horsepower, enough to sustain the plane in the air with power enough to land. But, “we must consider that there are many hills near where it fell, making it difficult to maneuver quickly,” said the Aeronautics report.

Being a pressurized plane, it keeps pumping air into the interior, and this might generate some reduction in the strength of the engines when they require power in minutes. The maximum speed that this type of aircraft can develop is 420 mph, and it can reach a maximum altitude of 27,000 feet.

The brush was dry where the plane crashed, and the grass caught on fire within seconds, according to some witnesses. This made it difficult for the military to control the flames, and so it was necessary that the Fire Department intervene quickly.

The fire burned about a hundred yards from where the plane crashed, according to some members of the First Infantry Battalion, who were the first on the scene of the accident. When firefighters arrived, the military had controlled the fire in the grassy areas, but they could not completely extinguish the flames of the plane. The Fire Department traveled to the disaster area with two cisterns of water to control the fire and took an ambulance to provide first aid. The Red Cross sent several aid workers and two ambulances, in case there were survivors of the accident.

At the disaster scene were also members of the Search and Rescue Unit of the Honduran Air Force, Aviation Security personnel, and Aircraft Airworthiness Inspectors.