49 Believed Killed in Plane Crash
A Continental Connection commuter plane with 48 people aboard crashed into a neighborhood outside Buffalo, N.Y., Thursday night, killing everybody on board, as well as at least one person on the ground, officials said.
Officials said Flight 3407, which had departed earlier from Newark, N.J., was approaching Buffalo Niagara International Airport when it disappeared without warning from air traffic controllers' radar screens, roughly six miles northeast of the field in the suburban community of Clarence Center.
The plane, a 74-seat turbo-prop Bombardier Q400, burst into flames on impact. A Federal Aviation Administration spokeswoman Laura Brown said there was no distress call in the seconds before the crash. "It just dropped off the radar," she said.
The reported weather at the time was overcast, with scattered clouds at 1,100 feet with light snow in the area. Winds were 13 miles per hour and visibility was three miles.
The National Transportation Safety Board said a team was being dispatched to the site to begin the official investigation.
Nearly three hours after the crash, the wreckage was still burning and local emergency officials provided preliminary information about damage, injuries and at least one fatality on the ground. They said a dozen houses were evacuated in suburban Clarence Center, there was one confirmed fatality on the ground and at least two residents were taken to the hospital.
Dave Bissonette, emergency coordinator for the town of Clarence, said the scene had been cordoned off and fire fighters had to battle flames fed by a significant quantity of fuel on the plane.
One witness told CNN that the airplane appeared to be nose down, with the left wing low. Brendan Biddlecom, a resident who lives near the crash site, told CNN that the plane "a low buzzing sound that sounded like a chainsaw in the woods."
In an interview with a local television station, Buffalo resident Chris Kausner said he was on the way to the airport to pick up his sister, Elise Kausner, a Florida law school student who was a passenger on the flight. "Right now, all I can think is the worst," he said.
The Q400 is a widely used turboprop built by Canada's Bombardier Aerospace, and high fuel prices have prompted airlines in past year or two to ramp up orders for such aircraft.
The flight was being operated by Colgan Air Inc., a subsidiary of Pinnacle Airlines Corp. The company flies commuter flights for Continental, United Express and US Airways Express. According to the company's Web site, Colgan Air was launched in 1991. It began operating the Q400 in February 2008.
The model was introduced in 2000, and more than 200 of the planes have been delivered and at least 60 are on order. In the past two years, aviation regulators have issued safety directives affecting two of the plane's systems. The first mandate was for changing flight procedures to ensure that the hydraulic flight controls would continue to operate properly despite a loss of hydraulic fluid in part of the system. The second safety mandate involved special inspections and repairs to the main landing gear, following a temporary grounding prompted by a series of incidents in which the gear failed to deploy properly.