Cruelty of Chance: The Cerritos mid-air collision and the crash of Aeroméxico flight 498

On the 31st of August 1986, a quiet holiday weekend in the Los Angeles suburb of Cerritos was shattered by a distant bang, the roar of engines, and a mighty explosion. In the skies overhead, two planes had come together in the busy airspace near Los Angeles International Airport: a private Piper PA-28 Archer, blundering off course through restricted airspace, and an Aeroméxico DC-9, its unsuspecting target, loaded with travelers returning home. At 11:52 a.m. and 9 seconds, they collided, sending both planes into brief but terrifying plunges, their respective crews plummeting to their deaths without ever knowing what had hit them. The catastrophic collision killed all 64 passengers and crew aboard the DC-9, all three aboard the PA-28, and 15 more on the ground. A neighborhood and a city were changed forever — but so was aviation itself, as the last in a long string of deadly mid-air disasters brought about a long overdue reckoning in America’s air traffic system. Despite tragedy after tragedy, by 1986 the expectation that pilots would see each other was still the only positive means of collision avoidance. All manner of airspace rules and procedures had been developed along the way, but at the end of the day, the only technology that could stop a nearly invisible light aircraft from plowing into a passenger airplane was human perception. It was the loss of another 82 lives to this self-evident problem that finally spurred Congress into action, accelerating the timeline to equip all US airliners with automated collision avoidance technology and close the loopholes that let light aircraft stray undetected into dangerous airspace. More than 35 years later, the end result is a national airspace system that has been rendered almost unrecognizable — a clean break from the trail of mid-air disasters that once tarnished America’s skies. <a href="https://admiralcloudberg.medium.com/cruelty-of-chance-the-cerritos-mid-air-collision-and-the-crash-of-aerom%C3%A9xico-flight-498-c5cb0202303a">Click Here</a>