On Dec. 9, 2012 devastating news struck the Rivera family and millions of "banda" music fans. Jenni Rivera, "La Gran Señora," "La Diva de la Banda," had gone missing. The plane that carried her and some of her crew went under the radar and couldn't be found. The media immediately got their hands on the story, speculating about the singer's life. The Rivera family ignored all the media reports and locked themselves in, praying and wishing that Jenni would still be alive. "It was such an unsettling feeling to hear that word 'missing' because you don't know how to feel, you don't... 'Do we sit here? Do we go? Do we go back home?'" Her daughter Chiquis expressed.
The days that followed were filled with anxiety, but hope was never lost. Until the Green Cross in Mexico found a plane that had crashed near Monterrey. It looked like it was the aircraft carrying Jenni and her team. "It's absolute torture, because you're trying to convince yourself of the positive, knowing that it can be the worst," Juan Rivera, Jenni's brother, said. Her family members were soon notified and went to the place of the accident, finding suitcases with the singer's clothes, and later identifying her body.
Now, a few days short of the first anniversary of this fatal tragedy, Mexico's National Office of Civil Aeronautics, or DGAC in Spanish, revealed a technical report written by the commission in charge of examining aeronautic accidents, in which they detail their conclusions on why the Learjet 25 carrying Jenni Rivera, Arturo Rivera Ruiz, Mario Macias Pacheco, Jacob Yebale Aguilar, Jorge Armando Sanchez Vazquez and pilots Miguel Perez Soto and Alessandro Torres Alvarez, failed, resulting in their deaths. The commission claims there's no way of determining a single cause of the accident because of the "high degree of destruction of the aircraft," however, there were some factors that were key in the plane failure.
They revealed that the pilot didn't really follow through with the proper regulations before flying, and exposed that 78-year-old Miguel Perez Soto didn't allow log entries about faults detected by the crew, like the fact that the plane vibrated once it reached the desired speed. In addition, the plane wasn't properly aligned. Perez Soto also didn't have the necessary permits to fly, while Alessandro Torres, the co-pilot wasn't allowed to fly the aircraft outside of the United States territory. According to the investigation, no one reported to the air traffic controllers any failure or emergency.
The statement released by the agency explained that the sudden and abrupt decontrol of the aircraft with altitude and speed changes, caused the beginning of a loss of control during the ascent phase. According to radar images, in the last 2:50 minutes of flight of the aircraft, there may have been a fault in the horizontal stabilizer that could've cause the collapse and, therefore, an uncontrollable vertical drop. They also noted that there wasn't any meteorological condition that could've contributed to the accident and that the plane didn't catch fire or exploded during its flight.
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