Official: Jenni Rivera's plane took 28,000-foot plunge
This image purports to show the the crash site of the Learjet that had been carrying singer Jenni Rivera and six others in northern Mexico on Dec. 9, 2012. / GDA via AP Images
MEXICO CITY Mexico's top transportation official says a plane carrying Mexican-American music superstar Jenni Rivera plunged almost vertically from more than 28,000 feet and hit the ground in a nose-dive at more than 600 miles an hour.
Gerardo Ruiz Esparza, Mexico's secretary of communications and transportation, offered the first detailed accounts of the moments leading up to the crash that killed Rivera and six other people aboard the Learjet on Sunday in northern Mexico.
Ruiz told Radio Formula that the plane hit the ground 1.2 miles from where it began falling, meaning it plummeted at a nearly 45 degree angle.
He says: "The plane practically nose-dived. The impact must have been terrible."
Ruiz said the pilot of the plane, Miguel Perez Soto, had a valid Mexican pilot's license that would have expired in January. Photos of a temporary pilot's certificate issued by the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration and found amid the wreckage said that Perez was 78.
Ruiz said there is no age limit for flying a civil aviation aircraft, though for commercial flights it's 65. In the United States it's unusual for a pilot to be 78.
The extremely high speeds at which Learjets can fly - close to the speed of sound - make them especially challenging to fly, pilots and safety experts said.
"These aircraft require an awful lot of skill to fly and don't leave a lot of margin for error," said Lee Collins, a cargo airline pilot and executive vice president of the Coalition of Airline Pilot Associations in Washington.
He said that in situations in which a pilot loses control of an aircraft, the plane could "get into a high-speed dive and inadvertently go through the speed of sound." Collins said.
One possible cause for a nose dive like the one described by Mexican officials would be a drastic failure of the flight controls - the ailerons, elevators and stabilizers, said former NTSB board member John Goglia, an aviation safety expert.
"High performance airplanes by their nature have issues," Goglia said. "The airplane flies faster than the human mind (can keep up) sometimes. ... It takes a lot of skill to stay in front of that airplane."
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Mexican authorities were performing DNA tests Tuesday on remains believed to belong to Rivera and the others killed when her plane went down in northern Mexico early Sunday morning.
Investigators said it would take days to piece together the wreckage of the plane carrying Rivera and find out why it went down.
The U.S. National Transportation Safety Board said it was sending a team to help investigate the crash of the Learjet 25, which disintegrated on impact in the rugged terrain in Nuevo Leon state in northern Mexico.
Human remains found in the wreckage were moved to a hospital in Monterrey, the closest major city to the crash, and Rivera's brother Lupillo was driven past a crowd of reporters to the area where the remains were being kept. He did not speak to the press.
A state official, speaking on condition of anonymity because of the ongoing investigation, said investigators were testing DNA from the remains in order to provide families with definitive confirmation of the deaths of their loved ones.
"We're in the process of picking up the fragments and we have to find all the parts," Argudin told reporters on Monday. "Depending on weather conditions it would take us at least 10 days to have a first report and many more days to have a report by experts."
In an interview on Radio Formula, Alejandro Argudin, head of Mexico's civil aviation agency, said Mexican investigators weren't sure yet if the Learjet had been equipped with flight data recorders. He also said there had been no emergency call from the plane before the crash. In the U.S., the plane would not have been required to have a flight data recorder or a cockpit voice recorder.
Fans of Rivera, who sold 15 million records and was loved on both sides of the border for her down-to-earth style and songs about heartbreak and overcoming pain, put up shrines to her with burning candles, flowers and photographs in cities from Hermosillo, Mexico to Los Angeles.
Some Spanish-language radio stations played her songs nonstop.
A brother, Juan Rivera, as well as mother Rosa Saavedra, still held on to hope that she would be found alive.
"I still trust God that perhaps the body isn't hers," Saavedra said in a press conference Tuesday, adding that she could have been kidnapped and another woman was at the crash site. "We're hoping it's not true, that perhaps someone took her and left another woman there."
The 43-year-old California-born Rivera known as the "Diva de la Banda" died as her career peaked. She was perhaps the most successful female singer in grupero, a male-dominated Mexico regional style, and had branched out into acting and reality television.
Besides being a singer, she appeared in the indie film Filly Brown, which was shown at the Sundance Film Festival, and was filming the third season of "I love Jenni," which followed her as she shared special moments with her children and as she toured through Mexico and the United States.
The Learjet 25, number N345MC, with Rivera aboard was en route from Monterrey to Toluca, outside Mexico City, when it was reported missing about 10 minutes after takeoff.
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Five words and 2 misspellings -- A remark from a 3rd grade dropout.
The only thing close to 45 degrees is the hillside.