The flight was routine until it wasn't. Two minutes after departure from Las Americas International Airport, the crew reported that the right engine had flamed out - a sudden, complete loss of thrust. They declared an emergency immediately, requesting clearance to return to the airport. But as they began their turn back, the left engine failed as well. A DC-9 can maintain controlled flight on one engine. With neither producing thrust, the aircraft became a 50-ton glider two miles south of the runway it had just left. There was no altitude to work with, no time to troubleshoot. The plane descended into the Caribbean Sea roughly two miles from the airport. All 97 passengers and five crew members died on impact. No one survived.

Initial speculation centered on sabotage. The family of Antonio Imbert Barrera - one of the surviving conspirators who had assassinated the dictator Rafael Trujillo in 1961, and a powerful political figure in the Dominican Republic - was aboard the aircraft. A terrorist attack seemed plausible in a country where political violence was still a living memory. The investigation, however, pointed to something far more mundane and no less devastating: water contamination in the fuel supply. Water had entered the jet fuel, and when it reached both engines in sequence, each flamed out. The aircraft had been brand new, the only DC-9-30 Dominicana de Aviacion ever purchased. Its fuel system worked perfectly. The fuel it was given did not.

The passenger manifest read like a cross-section of Caribbean life. Cruz, the boxer, had won the World Boxing Association lightweight title and was a source of immense pride in the Dominican Republic. He was traveling with his entire family. The Puerto Rico women's volleyball team had been competing in Santo Domingo and was returning home - their coach and eleven players occupied a block of seats near the rear of the aircraft. The crash devastated not one country but two, binding the Dominican Republic and Puerto Rico together in shared grief. For Dominican sports, the loss of Cruz was a blow that echoed for decades. For Puerto Rican volleyball, it was an erasure - nearly an entire national team, gone in an instant.

The fallout was swift. The United States Federal Aviation Administration banned Dominicana de Aviacion from operating flights to the United States, a crippling sanction for a Caribbean carrier whose most important routes crossed American airspace or landed at American airports. The ban was not lifted until later that year, and only after Dominicana leased a replacement DC-9 to be flown by crews from the Spanish airline Iberia - an extraordinary arrangement in which a national carrier effectively surrendered its cockpits to foreign pilots as the price of resuming service. Dominicana eventually recovered and operated for another quarter century, but the shadow of Flight 603 never fully lifted. In 1995, the government of President Joaquin Balaguer forced the airline to suspend services indefinitely. It ceased all operations in 1999.

The crash site lies in the Caribbean Sea roughly two miles south of the airport where Flight 603 began its final journey. There is no wreckage visible from the air, no marker on the water. The memory persists in other forms: in the record books where Cruz's name still appears, in the history of Puerto Rican volleyball where an entire generation of players vanished in a single evening, in the institutional memory of Dominican aviation where Flight 603 remained the country's worst air disaster for 26 years - until Birgenair Flight 301 crashed in the same waters in 1996, killing 189 people. Two catastrophes, separated by a generation, both departing from the same airport, both swallowed by the same sea.