The flight had departed Trinidad's Teniente Jorge Henrich Arauz Airport at 2:58 in the afternoon, carrying sixteen passengers and two crew members on the domestic route to Riberalta. Captain Kevin Roca Alpire and co-pilot Cecilia Tapia Salinas were flying a turboprop built in 1988, powered by twin Garrett TPE331 engines. The aircraft had passed through several operators across three countries -- Mesaba Airlines and Textron Financial in the United States, Bearskin Airlines in Canada, Lynx Air International, and Locair -- before Aerocon acquired it earlier that year. As Flight 25 approached Riberalta, the tower controller cleared the crew for an approach to runway 32, followed by a circling approach to runway 14. Winds were light at seven knots, but visibility had dropped to 3,000 meters in rain and fog. The controller warned the crew that the runway was wet.

At 3:55 PM, the crew reported passing the BIXIN waypoint. Two minutes later, they called the EDNAX fix, five nautical miles from the runway 32 threshold. What happened in the final moments of the approach was later attributed to windshear -- a sudden shift in wind speed or direction that can rob a landing aircraft of lift or control with almost no warning. Upon touching down, the Metro III veered hard to the right, departed the runway surface, and overturned in a field adjacent to the airport. Fire broke out shortly after impact. Of the eighteen people on board, eight died in the wreckage, including six-year-old Rossio Alvarez. Both pilots survived.

In the absence of any airport emergency response, the people of Riberalta became the rescue team. Roughly five hundred residents converged on the crash site and physically tore open the aircraft to reach the people trapped inside. They managed to pull ten survivors from the burning fuselage. The scene exposed a truth that went beyond one accident: Riberalta's airport, serving a city of more than 80,000 people in one of Bolivia's most remote regions, had no firefighting vehicle, no crash rescue equipment, and no capacity to respond to an emergency of any scale. Mayor Mauro Cambero acknowledged publicly that more lives could have been saved if the fire had been controlled in time.

The crash at Riberalta was not an isolated failure. According to the Bolivian government, it was Aerocon's fourth accident since 2012. President Evo Morales called for sanctions against the airline and demanded an investigation. The General Directorate of Civil Aviation formed a commission the following day, but the inquiry revealed systemic problems that extended far beyond a single carrier. The Directorate's own oversight had failed to catch or correct the safety deficiencies that accumulated across Aerocon's operations. Former Beni governor Ernesto Suarez directed blame at the central government for chronic underinvestment in AASANA, the national airports authority, arguing that the infrastructure and resources needed to prevent such tragedies had never been provided. In the remote departments of Bolivia's Amazon lowlands, where air travel is often the only practical connection between cities separated by flooded jungle and unpaved roads, the gap between what aviation safety requires and what these communities can afford remains dangerously wide.