Crew Reported ‘Significant Ice Buildup’ Before Crash (original) (raw)

Feb. 13, 2009

AMHERST, N.Y. The crew of the plane that crashed on approach to Buffalo Niagara International Airport on Thursday night, killing 50, reported “significant ice buildup” on the wings and windshield minutes before hitting a house and exploding into an intense fire, a federal transportation official said Friday.

The crew, having earlier requested a descent to avoid haze, lowered the landing gear and then extended the flaps, the movable panels on the rear edge of the wings that allow a plane to maintain lift as it slows, according to the flight data recorder.

But the plane immediately experienced “severe pitch-and-roll excursions,” meaning that the nose was moving up and down and the wings were wagging from side to side, said Steven Chealander of the National Transportation Safety Board.

Within 40 seconds, the plane had crashed, at a steep angle, into a white-and-gray frame house in the hamlet of Clarence Center, N.Y., about six miles from the airport runway, killing the 61-year-old man who lived there and all 49 people on the aircraft.

Mr. Chealander, a former airline captain, stressed that the safety board was in a fact-gathering stage and could not yet determine the cause of the crash, but the sequence he described was consistent with previous icing calamities. The plane, a Bombardier Dash 8 Q400, is certified for flight into known icing conditions, and there is no indication that the light snow and chilly air was unusual for Buffalo in February.

The investigation was proceeding with unusual speed; Mr. Chealander described the cockpit voice recorder, which captured two hours of conversation, and the flight data recorder, with 250 instrument measurements, as of “excellent quality.” He said the data recorder documented the use of the anti-icing system on the plane, which had 74 seats and twin turboprop engines, but did not show whether it worked.

“Significant ice buildup is an aerodynamic impediment,” Mr. Chealander said at a news briefing on Friday. “With too much buildup of ice, the shape of the wing can change, requiring different airspeeds.”

The crash of the plane, Continental Connection Flight 3407 from Newark, came less than a month after the Jan. 15 ditching of US Airways Flight 1549 in the Hudson River, in which all 155 people aboard survived.

Thursday’s accident was the first fatal crash of a commercial flight in the United States since a ComAir regional jet went down in Kentucky in 2006, and the deadliest since November 2001, when American Airlines Flight 587 landed in the Belle Harbor neighborhood of Queens, killing 265 people, including five on the ground. The tragedy rippled across the towns surrounding the Buffalo airport, where plane noise is a soundtrack of daily life, and it seemed everyone knew someone who knew someone on board Flight 3407, which was operated for Continental by Colgan Air.

State Senator Michael H. Ranzenhofer, a Republican whose district includes the neighborhood, said the passengers included his daughter’s onetime soccer coach, and a former intern in his office. Barbara Kaczmarek, one of 250 people who attended an afternoon church memorial service, said four of her husband’s co-workers from Northrop Grumman were aboard.

“It could have been the church that got hit,” said Janice Shel, who lives in Cheektowaga. “My mother lives in Clarence in a nursing home. It could have been her.”

Gov. David A. Paterson said he had met with a mother of three whose fiancé was killed, as well as a doctor from China who lost her husband and a state trooper whose cousin was on the plane.

“We’re all connected, and we find out how connected we are on days like this,” the governor said. “We try to love our neighbors as we would love ourselves, but today we love our neighbors because we realize they are ourselves.”

Flight 3407 was scheduled to depart at 7:10 p.m. but was delayed until 9:19 because of storms. It crashed an hour later.

The captain, Marvin Renslow, 47, had been working for Colgan since Sept. 9, 2005, but had only recently begun to fly the Dash 8 Q400. The first officer, Rebecca Shaw, 24, joined Colgan on Jan. 16, 2008.

Within the last 30 minutes of flight, the crew asked to descend to 12,000 feet from 16,000 because of the haze. Shortly afterward, the plane was cleared to 11,000 feet.

According to FlightAware.com, a Web site that tracks commercial and private planes by radar, the plane descended steadily, from 13,800 feet at 10:01 to 5,300 feet at 10:11 p.m.

At 10:15 p.m., the approach controller told the co-pilot to make a turn toward the runway and then to contact the tower controller on a different frequency. “Have a good night,” the controller told the co-pilot, according to an audio clip released by LiveATC.net. The co-pilot acknowledged.

That was the last exchange between air traffic control and the plane. At 10:16, the controller called for the plane three times and got no response and then asked the pilot of a nearby Delta Air Lines plane if he could see it. “Uh, negative,” the Delta pilot responded.

“Colgan 3407, Buffalo Tower, how do you hear?” the controller tried again.

Then the tower called for local police “to find out if anything’s on the ground.”

Several other pilots in the area reported seeing ice, according to the audio from the tower.

“We picked up some on the way down, I don’t think we’re building up any more now,” said one pilot.

Experts said Friday that ice can build up several ways, and that previous accidents, including the 1994 crash of an American Eagle turboprop in Roselawn, Ind., have shown that moving the flaps can lead to loss of control.

Gregory A. Feith, a former investigator with the safety board, said that on some planes, moving the flaps changed the air flow in a way that could cause the tail to stall, or lose lift, making it hard to control the angle of the nose. If the ice buildup differed on one side of the tail from the other, he said, the plane would roll; moving the flaps could make it worse.

Puneet Singla, an assistant professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering at the University at Buffalo, said that extending the flaps was meant to increase lift at low speed, but if ice interfered, the flaps could quickly slow the plane below the speed necessary to maintain stability. “Things happen all of a sudden,” he said. “You don’t get any chance.”

Both the airplane and the airline have had safety issues over the years, but whether any of them bear any relationship to the crash is unclear.

Federal Aviation Administration records show that Colgan paid three penalties totaling $20,521 in 2005 and 2007 for maintenance, flight operations and drug-testing violations. In 2005, the safety board found loose rivets in the tail elevator in a different model of small plane that Colgan flies; the Dash 8 also has had landing-gear problems.

In Clarence Center, population 1,747, residents said they immediately knew something was awry when the typical high-pitched noise of the dozens of planes that fly overhead daily was overtaken by a low buzzing sound around 10:15 p.m.

“I never get scared, but with the sound of the pitch, that’s where I got scared,” said Jamielynn Trujillo, who was watching television with her family in their apartment on Goodrich Road, and ran to the crash site, a block away, before the cockpit was consumed by fire. “Hearing it and then seeing what I just heard was horrific. I don’t ever want to fly again, I’ll tell you that much.”

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