Deadly crash spares 2 inside doomed house

NTSB officials believe ice buildup may have caused the crash that killed 50.

BUFFALO, N.Y. (AP) — There was no mayday call as Continental Connection Flight 3407, its wings caked with ice and its crew fighting to keep it airborne, dove sharply toward 6038 Long Street.

The twin turboprop smashed into the back of the suburban home late Thursday, killing all 49 people aboard and one person on the ground as it engulfed the building in a dramatic fireball that raged higher than the treetops.

The fire left little but a mound of charred debris and some landing gear jutting out of it, burning so hot it took until around nightfall Friday for workers to begin removing the bodies.

The crash somehow spared two people inside the doomed house. Karen Wielinski and her 22-year-old daughter, Jill, escaped after the building fell in on them.

“I was panicking a little but trying to stay cool,” Karen Wielinski told WBEN-AM in Buffalo. “I happened to notice a little light on the right of me. I shouted first in case anybody was out there. Then I just kind of pushed what was on top of me off and crawled out the hole ... The back of the house was gone, the fire had started. I could see the wing of the plane.”

Investigators said the crew of the commuter plane noticed significant ice buildup on the wings and windshield just before the aircraft began pitching and rolling violently.

Officials stopped short of saying the ice buildup caused Thursday night’s crash and stressed that nothing has been ruled out. But ice on the wings can interfere catastrophically with an aircraft’s handling and has been blamed for a number of major air disasters over the years.

Flight 3407, bound from Newark, N.J., went down in light snow and mist — ideal conditions for ice to form — about six miles short of the Buffalo airport, plunging nose-first through the roof of a house in the suburb of Clarence.

All 44 passengers, four crew members, an off-duty pilot and one person on the ground were killed. Among the passengers was a woman whose husband died in the World Trade Center attacks of Sept. 11.

It was the nation’s first deadly crash of a commercial airliner in 21‚Ñ2 years.

Karen Wielinski, 57, told the radio station she was watching TV in the family room when she heard a noise. She said her daughter was watching TV in another part of the house.

“Planes do go over our house, but this one just sounded really different, louder, and I thought to myself, ‘If that’s a plane, it’s going to hit something,”’ she said. “The next thing I knew the ceiling was on me.”

Wielinski’s husband, Doug, also was home. She said she hadn’t been told his fate, but added: “He was a good person, loved his family.”

Investigators pulled the black box recorders from the wreckage, sent them to Washington and immediately began analyzing the flight data and listening to the cockpit conversations.

Steve Chealander, a spokesman for the National Transportation Safety Board, said at an afternoon news conference that the crew of the twin-engine turboprop discussed “significant ice buildup” on the windshield and the leading edge of the wings at an altitude of around 11,000 feet as the plane was coming in for a landing.

The flight data recorder indicated the plane’s de-icing equipment was in the “on” position, but Chealander would not say whether the equipment was functioning.

The landing gear was lowered one minute before the end of the flight at an altitude of more than 2,000 feet, and 20 seconds later the wing flaps were set to slow the plane down, after which the aircraft went through “severe pitch and roll,” Chealander said.

The crew raised the landing gear at the last moment, just before the recording ran out. No mayday call came from the pilot.