The crew of a Continental Connection Flight 3407, which crashed in the quiet New York hamlet of Clarence Center on Thursday night, killing all 49 people aboard and one person on the ground, reported significant ice buildup on the wings and windshield on approach to the Buffalo, New York airport, according to the NTSB.
The NTSB did not blame the crash on ice buildup, as it's too early for a conclusion, but ice buildup on the wings of a plane can change the airfoil shape of the wing, causing it to give less lift to the plane.
William Voss, president of the Flight Safety Foundation in Alexandria, Virginia said:
"One of the things that makes icing so difficult is it can be very insidious. It’s very easy for a pilot to not notice that ice is accumulating. If the aircraft is descending, you can get to a situation where all of a sudden you try to level off and find out you can’t."
The NTSB has recovered both the flight data recorder and flight voice recorder from the crash site. The flight data recorder indicated the plane's de-icing equipment was in the "on" position, but officials would not say whether the equipment was functioning.
The Bombardier Q400, the plane involved in the crash, is a twin-engine turboprop plane that can carry 74 passengers.
The parent company of Scandinavian Airlines grounded its entire fleet of Q400s in 2007, and stopped using the planes altogether because landing gear malfunctions had caused three crashes within a period of six weeks.
The airline’s president and CEO said in a statement issued in October of 2007:
“Confidence in the Q400 has diminished considerably, and our customers are becoming increasingly doubtful about flying in this type of aircraft. Accordingly, with the board of directors’ approval, I have decided to immediately remove Dash 8 Q400 aircraft from service.”
You can watch a crash of a Q400, with landing gear collapse, attached to this post.
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