The National Transportation Safety Board revealed a number of details about the Continental Express flight to Buffalo that crashed on Thursday night.
NTSB member Steve Chealander said the plane was on autopilot during part of its descent. Chealander told the AP that "the company that operated the flight recommends pilots fly manually in icy condition" and that pilots are required to be in manual in severe icy weather. He said, "You may be able in a manual mode to sense something sooner than the autopilot can sense it." This will raise more questions about the FAA's regulations over flying conditions in icy weather—the Buffalo News reports that other turboprop carriers suspend their flights during cold weather.
The NTSB also described the plane's violent final moments, saying it dropped 800 feet in five second. From the NY Times:
Closer examination of the cockpit voice recorder and the flight data recorder from the plane shows that 26 seconds before the recordings were stopped by the impact, a warning alerted the crew that the plane might lose lift and fall out of the sky. An automatic system tried to push the nose down to gain airspeed, and yet the nose climbed to 31 degrees, far steeper than the steepest normal climb. Suddenly, the nose plunged to a down angle of 45 degrees, almost like a fighter plane breaking off to dive. Then it rolled right, beyond 90 degrees, all the way to 106 degrees.
On Saturday, Chealander had said that the planedid not nosedive into the house in Clarence Center: "What we found were all four corners of the airplane -- the cockpit, the tail section, both wings and engines -- and they're where they should be if the plane was laying flat."
