Was ice the culprit in last weeks deadly plane crash? Or some other unlikely chain of events?
By Patrick Smith Feb. 16, 2009 | On Thursday evening, Colgan Air Flight 3407, a 74-seat, twin-engined turboprop, slammed into a house shortly before it was scheduled to land in Buffalo, N.Y. Fifty people were killed, including one person on the ground, making it the worst aviation crash on U.S. soil in over seven years. Colgan Air, based in Manassas, Va., flies on behalf of Continental Airlines as a Continental Connection code-share carrier, using its own aircraft and crews. Ice. According to the early speculation, ice was the likely culprit. Before we get to if and how icing can bring down a plane, I’d like to begin by dismissing the idea, now making the rounds in some media circles, that the airplane itself, a Bombardier DHC-8-400, was somehow old-fashioned or unsafe because it happened to be powered by propellers. The Canadian-built DHC-8 is known to pilots as the Dash-8, and the -400 is the newest and most advanced variant, nicknamed the Q400. The Q stands for “quiet”; the plane’s
