Dominicana de Aviación Flight 603
Aviation accident
On February 15, 1970, Dominicana de Aviación Flight 603, en route from Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic to San Juan, Puerto Rico crashed into the Caribbean Sea shortly after takeoff. The crash killed all 97 passengers and 5 crew on board, making it the deadliest aviation disaster to occur within the Dominican Republic until the crash of Birgenair Flight 301 in 1996, in the Caribbean Sea, leaving 189 dead.
Aircraft
The aircraft, a McDonnell Douglas DC-9-32 registered as HI-177 (with serial number 47500 and line number 546), was manufactured by McDonnell Douglas in 1969. The aircraft was powered by two Pratt & Whitney JT8D-7 turbofan engines. It had been in service with Dominicana for less than a month (with only 354 flying hours) when it crashed and was the only DC-9-30 purchased by the airline.
Accident
The airliner was operating an international flight from Las Américas International Airport near Santo Domingo, to San Juan's Luis Muñoz Marín International Airport. The flight took off at about 6:30 PM. Two minutes after departure, one of the engines lost thrust. The crew declared an emergency, telling air traffic controllers that the right engine had flamed out, and requested to immediately return to the airport. While the crew were preparing to turn back toward the airport, the left engine also flamed out. The aircraft descended until it hit the sea about two miles south of the airport.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Dominicana de Aviación Flight 603” is aviation accident. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Dominicana, Aviación and Flight, not as a finished interpretation.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jun 1, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q5290887. Authority coordinates are 18.388, -69.679. None of the 1 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1970, 1996 and 1969.
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This entry incorporates text from “Dominicana de Aviación Flight 603” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.