Qualla: 2012 Air Class Líneas Aéreas Fairchild Swearingen Metroliner crash

2012 Air Class Líneas Aéreas Fairchild Swearingen Metroliner crash: Introduction

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Alan Wilson from Stilton, Peterborough, Cambs, UK, CC BY-SA 2.0. For more than a month, the families of Walter Rigo and Martín Riva waited without an answer. Their Fairchild Metroliner had taken off into the winter night of 6 June 2012, bound for Buenos Aires with a load of freight for DHL, and somewhere off the small island of Isla de Flores it simply stopped responding. The Río de la Plata is wide and brown and shallow in a way that hides things; it gives up its secrets slowly. A scuba diver finally found the wreckage in late July, two kilometers southwest of the island, on the riverbed where the aircraft had come to rest with its crew.

Image: Alan Wilson from Stilton, Peterborough, Cambs, UK | CC BY-SA 2.0

2012 Air Class Líneas Aéreas Fairchild Swearingen Metroliner crash: Two Men, One Aircraft

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Alan Wilson from Stilton, Peterborough, Cambs, UK, CC BY-SA 2.0. The plane was a Fairchild Swearingen SA227-AC Metro III, registration CX-LAS, built in 1982 and by 2012 carrying more than twenty-six thousand hours on its airframe. The Metroliner is a workhorse of the cargo world, a slim, fast turboprop that crews fly through the small hours ha...

Image: Alan Wilson from Stilton, Peterborough, Cambs, UK | CC BY-SA 2.0

2012 Air Class Líneas Aéreas Fairchild Swearingen Metroliner crash: A River That Would Not Tell

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Alan Wilson from Stilton, Peterborough, Cambs, UK, CC BY-SA 2.0. When contact was lost shortly after takeoff from Carrasco, the Uruguayan Air Force and Navy launched a search across the estuary. Weeks passed. Crews combed an enormous grid of grey water, and by the time half the search area had been covered they had found nothing, no debris, no...

Image: Alan Wilson from Stilton, Peterborough, Cambs, UK | CC BY-SA 2.0

2012 Air Class Líneas Aéreas Fairchild Swearingen Metroliner crash: What the Investigators Found

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Alan Wilson from Stilton, Peterborough, Cambs, UK, CC BY-SA 2.0. Uruguay's aviation accident commission, under the Ministry of National Defence, pieced the night back together. Their report describes a chain rather than a single failure. The crew had skipped a stop at the meteorological office to gather weather information before departure. So...

Image: Alan Wilson from Stilton, Peterborough, Cambs, UK | CC BY-SA 2.0

2012 Air Class Líneas Aéreas Fairchild Swearingen Metroliner crash: Isla de Flores

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Alan Wilson from Stilton, Peterborough, Cambs, UK, CC BY-SA 2.0. The island the flight never cleared has its own long history. Isla de Flores sits in the Río de la Plata a few kilometers off Montevideo, a low scrap of land crowned by a nineteenth-century lighthouse that once guided ships toward the port. For generations it served as a quaranti...

Image: Alan Wilson from Stilton, Peterborough, Cambs, UK | CC BY-SA 2.0