A private jet that crashed in Bangor, Maine on Jan. 25, killing all six people aboard, remained on the ground 8 minutes longer than Federal Aviation Administration guidelines allow after receiving a deicing treatment, the National Transportation Safety Board said Friday in a preliminary report. The Bombardier Challenger 600, owned by a Texas law firm and bound for France from Houston, lost control at liftoff during a snowstorm, came down upside down on the runway and burst into flames.
The preliminary report does not identify a cause of the crash, which the NTSB said it expects to determine in a final report sometime next year. Aviation safety experts said the findings point strongly to ice contamination on the plane’s right wing as what likely triggered the fatal loss of control.
The timeline
FAA guidelines state that pilots should take off no more than 9 minutes after the start of the second anti-icing chemical’s application under conditions like those that evening. That second chemical was applied at 7:27 p.m. The plane did not attempt takeoff until 7:44 p.m. — 17 minutes later.
The plane sat at the deicing pad for almost five minutes after treatment while restarting its engines, then sat on the runway for almost four more minutes before the pilots told the tower they were ready to depart.
The cockpit voice recorder captured the pilot saying it was “standard” to have 14 to 18 minutes and that if the wait was more than 30 minutes, they would return to the ramp to have the plane retreated, with the copilot concurring. John Cox, CEO of Safety Operating Systems and a former airline pilot who consults on aviation safety, said that comment “makes me wonder if they actually ran the time” because the guidelines make it clear they didn’t have that much time.
“We know this much. The airplane exceeded the holdover time chart,” Cox said.
Expert assessment
Former NTSB and FAA crash investigator Jeff Guzzetti said Friday’s preliminary report “removes some of the mystery of what happened here.”
“There is no doubt in my mind that the loss of control at liftoff — which was accompanied with an aerodynamic stall warning and sudden right bank — was likely due to snow and ice contamination on the right wing,” Guzzetti said.
Guzzetti said the pilots’ remarks about how long they could wait before a second deicing treatment raised questions about how much experience the Texas-based crew had with flying in cold weather. The NTSB said it will examine crew experience alongside the airport’s deicing procedures, the quality of the chemicals used and every other factor that could have contributed to the crash.
Multiple airport CCTV cameras captured the crash sequence, according to the preliminary report. “Several of these cameras showed the airplane impact the ground followed by multiple explosions as the impact sequence progressed,” the report states.
Conditions at the airport
The six aboard had stopped in Bangor to refuel as a major snowstorm was beginning to reach the region, amid light snow, mild winds and near-zero temperatures. Snow would eventually accumulate to about 9.5 inches (24 cm), though it was only beginning at the time of the crash.
Just before the crash, another aircraft aborted its takeoff, radioing the tower that visibility wasn’t great and that it would need another application of deicing fluid.
Bangor International Airport, about 235 miles (378 km) north of Boston, is among the closest U.S. airports to Europe and is frequently used as a refueling stop by private jets flying overseas. The Bombardier was headed for the Champagne region of France.
Investigators were initially hampered by the extreme weather conditions but later recovered the cockpit voice and data recorders for analysis. The airport remained closed for several days after the crash.
The victims
The six people killed were Houston attorney Tara Arnold, 46; event planner Shawna Collins, 53, of Houston; chef Nick Mastrascusa, 43, of Hawaii; sommelier Shelby Kuyawa, 34, of Hawaii; and pilots Jacob Hosmer, 47, of Pearland, Texas, and Jorden Reidel, 33, of Texas. The passengers were traveling from Houston to France; Collins, Mastrascusa and Kuyawa worked for Arnold’s luxury travel company.
Prior crashes with the same aircraft model
The Bombardier Challenger 600 has been involved in two previous fatal crashes attributed to ice buildup — one in Birmingham, England, and one in Montrose, Colorado, both more than two decades ago. Several other incidents have involved the aircraft model in icing-related rolls on takeoff in cold weather, though pilots recovered in those cases.
After the earlier fatal crashes, the FAA published new rules clarifying that even a small amount of frost on the wings can endanger a flight, standardizing deicing procedures to ensure all frozen particles are removed and requiring a combination of tactile and visual inspections. Bombardier was also required to add a cold-weather operations warning to the Challenger 600’s flight manual. More than 1,000 Challenger 600s have been delivered; Bombardier said the aircraft is designed to be safe.