On 6 February 1996, the Boeing 757-200 operating the route crashed shortly after take-off from Puerto Plata's Gregorio Luperón International Airport, killing all 189 people on board.

[1][2][3] The cause was pilot error after receiving incorrect airspeed information from one of the pitot tubes, which investigators believe was blocked by a wasp nest built inside it.

[5]: 4–8 The passengers consisted mainly of Germans, along with nine Poles including two Members of the Parliament, Zbigniew Gorzelańczyk of the Democratic Left Alliance, and Marek Wielgus of the Nonpartisan Bloc for Support of Reforms (BBWR).

[5]: 18 This action immediately triggered the 757's stick shaker stall alert, warning the confused pilots that the aircraft was flying dangerously slow.

The first officer and relief pilot, aware of the scale of the problem, were suggesting various methods to recover from the stall, but the confused captain ignored all of them.

The Dominican Republic government's General Directorate of Civil Aviation (Spanish: Dirección General de Aeronáutica Civil) (DGAC) investigated the accident and determined the probable cause to be:[10] The crew's failure to recognize the activation of the stick shaker as a warning of imminent entrance to the stall, and the failure of the crew to execute the procedures for recovery from the onset of loss of control.Investigations later showed that the plane was actually travelling at 220 knots (410 km/h; 250 mph) at the time of the accident.

Investigators believe that the most likely culprit was the black and yellow mud dauber (Sceliphron caementarium), a type of solitary sphecid wasp well known to Dominican pilots, which makes a cylindrical nest out of mud and tends to establish a nest in artificial, cylindrical structures.

[5]: 20 [11][12] According to Cetin Birgen, president and CEO of Birgenair, the pitot covers were removed two days before the accident in order to conduct an engine test run.

[8] They reconfirmed that the pilots should have followed existing procedures and aborted the takeoff when they found that their airspeed indicators were already in significant disagreement as the plane accelerated down the runway.

[8] Shortly after the crash of Flight 301, the airline's overall image and profits became heavily damaged, and some of its planes were grounded at the same time.

Birgenair went bankrupt in October of the same year as there were concerns about safety after the accident, causing a decline in passenger numbers.