Plane Crashes into Buffalo-Area Home

This caught my attention as I travel between New York and Buffalo several times a year. Very eerie...

CBC Link

Very sad day for Buffalo. No doubt many of those on board will have been from there.

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I just spent over an hour on google streetview "driving" around Clarence Centre! It's a very interesting town, I could live there! Amusing to see all the Tim Horton's....

I wonder if this was a suicidal pilot?

Suicidal Pilot? Wow...


I don't know a lot about airplanes and flying but I've talked to pilots and overheard conversations and learned little bits and pieces here and there while at Porter (which flies the exact same aircraft). I think this could have been ice related. Many of the news stories are suggesting it could have played a factor, and it seems the most likely. Ice on a wing or tail is very serious. Since they were on approach, they were probably low enough that ice could have stalled the plane (called a tail-stall, I believe) and they had no chance for recovery. Usually to rectify an issue that serious it could take thousands of feet to get the plane back under control. It'd be the equivalent of black ice really.

The Q400 has heaters in the wings, but I don't know about the tail section, although it would seem to make sense for them to be present there as well. I think it was something very sudden and they were too low to the ground to fix it.

jn_12 said:

Suicidal Pilot? Wow...


I don't know a lot about airplanes and flying but I've talked to pilots and overheard conversations and learned little bits and pieces here and there while at Porter (which flies the exact same aircraft). I think this could have been ice related. Many of the news stories are suggesting it could have played a factor, and it seems the most likely. Ice on a wing or tail is very serious. Since they were on approach, they were probably low enough that ice could have stalled the plane (called a tail-stall, I believe) and they had no chance for recovery. Usually to rectify an issue that serious it could take thousands of feet to get the plane back under control. It'd be the equivalent of black ice really.

The Q400 has heaters in the wings, but I don't know about the tail section, although it would seem to make sense for them to be present there as well. I think it was something very sudden and they were too low to the ground to fix it.

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Tail stall is unlikely. That would only happen at very high angles of attack such that the airflow over the tail was already turbulent. That usually only occurs after you've stalled the wings.

If icing was a factor it would likely have been on the wings themselves. Notably, other aircrew did call in icing conditions as per media reports. The eyewitness accounts do point to a stall. However, they were 5 miles out. If the aircraft stalled that far out with a normal 3 degree glideslope they might still have had sufficient altitude to recover unless the house they impacted was on unusually high terrain (relative to the rest of the area). Perhaps they missed activating the anti-icing/de-icing equipment (does the Q400 have boots like the old -8?) while they were focused on the approach, leading to a build-up as they descended into icing conditions leading to a stall.

This is not the equivalent of 'black ice' however. Failing to monitor any build-up would be considered pilot error and would certainly be negligent handling by the air crew. You can see ice building up on the aircraft. And you can feel the change in flying characteristics. And the anti/de-ice is on the checklist usually for descents.

^ Thanks for that. I was only basing my observations on pieces of info I had picked up here and there just from talking to pilots and co-workers who fly over the last year or so. It was a guess on my part entirely.

As for the Boots, yes Q400s have them.
Just a guess but perhaps if there was any turbulence, they might not have noticed any changes in performance? But you're right, it should have been part of the normal procedure for an approach.

My dad lives on the other side of the airport, almost exactly 180 degrees from the accident. Had the aircraft of came in from the south side, its flight path would have been very close to over my dad's house.

Very sad indeed. I had flown into Buffalo last Sunday and my Dad is flying into Buffalo tomorrow morning. I was hoping he didn't change his flight to come home sooner.

First Canadian Geese take down the airliner over the Hudson... now a Canadian plane crashes over Buffalo. Not a great week for Canadian exports.

Speaking of which... any coincidence that both these two crashes took place on propeller commuter aircraft? Do they tend to have a poorer safety record?

Pretty sure the one in NYC that landed in the Hudson was not a Turbo-Prop.

As for safety, the Bombardier Q-400 has a pretty strong safety record. The only issues were last year with landing gear on a few planes in the Scandinavian Airlines fleet, and that was rectified (they also had older version of the Q-400).

People see propellers on an aircraft and kinda get freaked out sometimes. However, they are pretty much a hybrid, and perform very strongly.

mjlo8, what are you talking about? The plane that had to be ditched in the Hudson was an airbus a320. And (just from memory) the last prop passenger airplane I recall crashing in Canada was back in the 80s. It was the Air Ontario Dryden crash which was also caused by ice on the wings.

jn_12 said:

I don't know a lot about airplanes and flying but I've talked to pilots and overheard conversations and learned little bits and pieces here and there while at Porter (which flies the exact same aircraft). I think this could have been ice related. Many of the news stories are suggesting it could have played a factor, and it seems the most likely. Ice on a wing or tail is very serious. Since they were on approach, they were probably low enough that ice could have stalled the plane (called a tail-stall, I believe) and they had no chance for recovery. Usually to rectify an issue that serious it could take thousands of feet to get the plane back under control. It'd be the equivalent of black ice really.

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Best to let the investigation determine what actually happened. News media in particular are notorious for relating unsubstantiated information as "possibilities" for a crash.

I'm booked on a Colgan flight from Newark in a week and a bit on a connecting flight (Continental) from Arizona to Buffalo, on a Dash 8/Q400. So I was a bit spooked to read about this this morning to say the least. I was slightly surprised that there was only one Canadian on the flight, but it was later in the evening.

Though statistically, air remains the safest way to travel.

But seeing this in my itinerary made me identify closer on this, even though it's an earlier flight in the day.

What a tragedy.

Hydrogen said:

Best to let the investigation determine what actually happened. News media in particular are notorious for relating unsubstantiated information as "possibilities" for a crash.

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I meant that the media is making this suggestion, and it is incidentally what I've also learned from working with pilots daily. I'm very much aware that news media is very poor and often take "eye witness" accounts as gospel and whatnot.

Today in front of the ferry terminal CP24 basically stalked Porter passengers that were entering, asking if they felt safe flying on our planes after such an incident. Seriously...

casaguy said:

mjlo8, what are you talking about? The plane that had to be ditched in the Hudson was an airbus a320.

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I was referring to the Canada geese which reportedly caused the Hudson crash.

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2009/02/12/national/main4798729.shtml

Such of a horrific ending compared with the plane crash that ended with such success in New York just a month ago.

Its kind of eerie thinking about the media reports just several months ago, boasting that the US hasn't had a major air crash in over 2 years, now we've had 2 in barely a month's time frame, one with no survivors at all.