Officials hunt clues after US plane crash kills 50
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CLARENCE CENTER, New York : Officials sifted through the smoldering wreckage of a US plane Friday hunting for clues after it nosedived onto a house in New York state, exploding in a fireball and killing 50 people.
Teams of police, special agents and officials from the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) carefully moved in after firefighters spent hours dousing walls of flames that had engulfed the area, outside Buffalo.
Continental Flight 3407, on a flight from Newark in New Jersey to Buffalo, plummeted onto the house in Clarence Center late Thursday.
A possible first clue was yielded by the recordings on the black boxes recovered from the scene, which revealed that the pilots had been concerned about ice building up on the wings as they approached Buffalo airport.
The Bombardier Dash 8 Q400 exploded on impact around 10:20 pm (0320 GMT), about five minutes before it was due to land, carrying 49 passengers and crew. One person in the crushed house also died, although a woman and her daughter escaped from the rubble of their home with only minor injuries.
The plane was "nose down, tilted to the left so I was able to see the underbelly of the plane," motorist Tony Tatro told CNN after the plane skimmed over his car and crashed just yards (meters) from his own home.
The wreckage was "fully engulfed in flames and 40 and 50 feet (12 and 15 meters) high. The heat was intense enough you couldn't get to the same side of the street," he added.
The tail of the plane -- surrounded by a plume of white smoke, twisted debris and a swath of grey ash -- was the only part of the aircraft still visible at the crash site Friday.
"We heard a very low humming sound, like a buzz. It was something I have never heard before. Then there was dead silence. After that dead silence, the whole building shook. At that point, you heard a terrifying boom, like a crash," resident Jamie Lynn Trujillo told Fox News.
Her 12-year-old daughter, Tomasita Trujillo, told AFP the plane was on fire before it crashed.
"I looked out my window and saw flames on everything except one of the wings," she said. "It sounded like something was caught (on the plane). It didn't sound right."
Investigators said black box recordings showed the crew was concerned about the weather and low visibility due to snow and mist as they approached Buffalo.
They asked to drop to 11,000 feet, but began to see a problem with ice.
"The crew discussed significant ice buildup, ice on the windshield and leading edge of the wings," Steve Chealander, an official with the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB), told a press conference.
Seconds after they opened the landing gear, the plane suddenly began "a series of severe pitch and roll excursions," he said.
"Then shortly after that, the crew attempted to raise the gear and flaps just before the end of the recording. And that's it from the recording that we have thus far," he added.
President Barack Obama offered his condolences to the families and friends of those killed.
"Tragic events such as these remind us of the fragility of life, and the value of every single day," he said.
Erie County Executive Chris Collins told CNN the plane was carrying 5,800 pounds of jet fuel and turned into a fireball on impact.
Controllers had desperately tried to make contact with the pilot as the plane, run by Colgan Air for Continental, approached Buffalo-Niagara International Airport, also the tourist gateway to Niagara Falls.
Bombardier, the maker of the plane, sent condolences to victims' families and said it had dispatched its own technical teams to the site to assist the NTSB investigation.
Among the victims was Beverly Eckert, whose husband was killed in the September 11, 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center in New York, and Alison Des Forges, an expert on Rwanda, and a senior advisor to Human Rights Watch, officials said.
Eckert, who met with Obama at the White House earlier this month along with other relatives of those killed in the attacks, was traveling to Buffalo to mark what would have been her husband, Sean Rooney's, 58th birthday.
Eckert "was an inspiration to me and to so many others, and I pray that her family finds peace and comfort in the hard days ahead," Obama said at the White House.
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