Private Jet Crashes at Aspen Airport

A Challenger 605 jet, recently sold to an owner in Mexico, was being flown into Aspen Airport to pick up the owner and fly them home when it crashed. It was a rather unpleasant weather day; the pilot had already aborted one approach. There were tailwind gusts of up to 30 knots (35 mph), which would have tended to push the plane down the runway further than one might want to go---at 2:00 mins, Camera 5 shows how tailwind was pushing him too fast and too far down the runway. At 2:17, he bounces into the air and then, for reasons unknown, ends up dives for the runway---and that the explosion follows shortly thereafter. One might conjecture he really wanted to be on the ground. The first officer died; the pilot and the reserve pilot survived. By some reports, the owner and his family saw the jet crash in front of them. Text that follows from the Aspen Journalism, following their FOI requesting the release of information for the infrared video. There were airliners and other jets loaded with passengers waiting to take off that day off to the side of the runway...