The aircraft left Tefe Airport at 17:30 on May 14, 2004, bound for Eduardo Gomes International in Manaus. Thirty passengers were on board with three crew. Rico Linhas Aereas was a regional carrier that connected the small river towns of the upper Amazon to the regional capital, and this route was the kind of commuter service that many people in Amazonas depended on to travel from places with no roads. The Embraer EMB 120ER had been built in 1988 and carried registration PT-WRO. The engine and propeller logbooks were current, and the airframe had a standard maintenance record. The captain had logged 19,069 flight hours, about 5,800 of them on this type. The first officer had 11,927. Both men were seasoned pilots with experience specific to the aircraft they were flying.

At 18:26, the aircraft began its descent to 2,000 feet, aiming to intercept the localizer for the Manaus airport's instrument approach. It was sixty-four nautical miles out. Five minutes later, with other traffic needing to be separated around the terminal, controllers put Flight 4815 onto radar vectors and assigned it a series of headings. Three minutes after that, controllers issued a final heading instruction and repeated the altitude: maintain 2,000 feet. The pilots acknowledged. That was the last contact between the flight and the ground. In the next several minutes, while still supposedly holding at 2,000 feet and flying toward the intercept point, the aircraft descended nearly all the way to the ground. It struck the forest wings level, with power still on, still configured for flight.

The crash site lay north of the Rio Negro, deep in the dense forest that covers most of the approach to Manaus. A six-hour search through the night followed. At 00:10 on May 15, rescue teams finally located the wreckage, and the first responders arrived at the scene by 00:28. What they found was what they expected and dreaded: the aircraft had come apart on impact, and none of the 33 people aboard had survived. Thirty passengers had been heading home to Manaus from their lives and errands in the smaller towns upriver. Three pilots and cabin crew had been at work. Every family that had been waiting at Eduardo Gomes that evening was going to be told the same thing.

The investigation turned quickly to the aircraft's flight data recorder and cockpit voice recorder. Both were found. The crash had been violent enough that the digital flight data acquisition unit, which feeds data to the recorder, could not be located at all. The flight data recorder's outer casing was visibly damaged, but the inner protective casing had stayed intact, and investigators hoped for readable data. Both recorders were shipped first to Embraer, the Brazilian manufacturer in Sao Jose dos Campos, but the damage was beyond what Embraer's facilities could handle. The recorders then went to the National Transportation Safety Board laboratories in Washington, DC. Even there the effort to extract data from the flight data recorder failed because its recording head was contaminated. What the aircraft had been doing in the minutes between the last radio call and impact would not be fully reconstructed.

Accidents like this one haunt small regional aviation across the Amazon, where the forest is thick, the weather turns quickly, and an airplane that disappears can take days to find even when crash coordinates are roughly known. Flight 4815 has a final report on file with CENIPA, Brazil's civil aviation investigation authority, and the route it flew, from Sao Paulo de Olivenca to Tefe to Manaus, still operates today on different aircraft. For the families of the thirty-three, the absence of complete recorder data meant living with the limits of what investigators could tell them. The aircraft had been cleared to 2,000 feet. It had not stayed there. Beyond that, much of what happened in the last minutes is a gap that the jungle closed over.