Fifty People Dead When Plane Plunges into New York Home

Fifty people were killed in a plane crash late Thursday night, when a commuter airliner plunged into a suburban home about five miles from Buffalo Niagara International Airport in Buffalo, New York. All 49 people aboard the plane, and one person in the house, were killed in the crash.

“It was a direct hit,” Erie County Emergency Coordinator David Bissonette said at a televised news conference. “It’s remarkable that it only took one house. As devastating as that is, it could have wiped out the entire neighborhood.”

The Continental Connection Flight 3407 had departed from Newark, New Jersey, and was about five miles from Runway 3 at Buffalo Niagara International Airport when it suddenly took a nose dive into a single-family house below at 10:20 p.m. A woman and a child were able to escape the house with minor injuries. One person on the ground was killed, but it is unclear if they were inside the house.

The aircraft, a Bombardier Dash 8 Q400 turboprop plane, a new aircraft in service since last April, was carrying 44 passengers, four crew members, and an off duty Continental Connection pilot.

Only minutes before the crash, air traffic controllers had a routine conversation with the female pilot, who had experience of 3,300 hours of flying time with the airline. There was no sign that anything was out of the ordinary and no call for help when communications ended.

Investigators from the National Transportation Safety Board arrived Friday morning in Clarence, New York. The plane’s flight data recorders were recovered and will be sent to Washington for analysis. It is initially believed that weather was a factor in the accident. Skies were foggy and snowy; winds were about 17 mph at the time of the crash.

After the crash, the airport tower warned other planes to watch for icing on their aircrafts’ wings. “We’ve been picking up ice here for about the past 10 minutes,” one pilot stated.

Officials this morning said they were working to control the fire which delayed their investigation. “It was a major fire and explosion,” stated National Transportation Safety Board member Steve Chealander at a televised morning news conference. “There’s a lot of carnage.”