UPDATE: Four Bodies Are Recovered in Connecticut Plane Crash Four bodies were pulled from the wreckage of a plane crash in East Haven, Conn., investigators said Saturday, but it was still unclear what caused the turboprop aircraft to plunge into a house and burst into flames on Friday. Investigators did not immediately release the names of the victims. Family members identified the pilot as Bill Henningsgaard, a former Microsoft executive from the Pacific Northwest who was touring colleges with his son Maxwell. Both died in the crash. Two children, ages 1 and 13, who were at home when the plane slammed into their house, are presumed to be the other victims. The children’s mother survived. Mr. Henningsgaard, 54, took off from Teterboro Airport in northern New Jersey with Maxwell, 17, on Friday morning, intending to make the short trip to Connecticut to visit Yale University. Around 11:25 a.m., something went wrong while Mr. Henningsgaard was approaching Tweed New Haven Airport, and the plane crashed into a house on Charter Oak Avenue. Mr. Henningsgaard was in contact with air traffic controllers and never declared an emergency, Patrick Murray, an investigator with the National Transportation Safety Board, said at a news conference on Saturday. Earlier it was reported that the pilot had aborted an initial landing attempt and crashed on a second try, but Mr. Murray said that was not the case. Just before the crash, the air traffic controller asked Mr. Henningsgaard if he had the runway in sight, Mr. Murray said. He answered yes, and the transmission was lost. Mr. Murray said the plane crashed at a 60- to 70-degree angle and was inverted when it hit the ground about 2,800 yards from the runway. Blair Henningsgaard, Mr. Henningsgaard’s brother, described him as a “very careful pilot” with six or seven years of experience. But the crash on Friday was not his first. In 2009, Mr. Henningsgaard was flying a single-engine plane with his mother to Seattle to see his daughter perform in a play when the engine failed and the plane crashed into the Columbia River, on the border between Oregon and Washington. No one was injured, and Mr. Henningsgaard wrote about the experience in a blog post a few days later. “I forced myself to confront that fact that the situation any pilot fears — a mid-air emergency, was happening right then, with my mother in the plane,” he wrote. “After a harrowing five minutes in the air, we crashed into the water in front of Astoria, thankfully alive and able to scramble out onto the wing.” NYTIMES
Posted on: Sun, 11 Aug 2013 06:57:01 +0000
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