2605

Western Airlines Flight 2605, nicknamed the "Night Owl", was an international scheduled passenger flight from Los Angeles, California, to Mexico City, Mexico. On October 31, 1979, at 5:42 a.m. CST (UTC−06:00), the aircraft used for the flight, a McDonnell Douglas DC-10, crashed at Mexico City International Airport in fog, after landing on a runway closed for maintenance. Of the 88 people on board, 72 were killed in the crash; and one person on the ground, a maintenance worker, also died when the plane struck his vehicle.Flight 2605 remains the deadliest air accident in Mexico City. The event is the third-deadliest aviation accident to occur on Mexican soil, after the crashes of two Boeing 727s—the 1969 crash of Mexicana Flight 704 and Mexicana Flight 940 in 1986. The crash of Flight 2605 was one of three fatal McDonnell Douglas DC-10 accidents in 1979, occurring just over five months after the crash of American Airlines Flight 191 at Chicago's O'Hare International Airport and less than a month before the crash of Air New Zealand Flight 901 on Mount Erebus in Antarctica.

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