21 killed as plane hits hangar on take-off
The cause of the crash the deadliest US air accident in nearly 14 months wasn't immediately clear.
US Airways Express Flight 5481, a Beech 1900 twin-engine turboprop, was taking off in clear, windy weather from Charlotte/Douglas International Airport when it hit the corner of a US Airways hangar at full throttle just before 9am local time, officials said.
Nineteen passengers and two crew members were aboard the flight, which was operated by Air Midwest and headed to Greenville-Spartanburg, said Federal Aviation Administration spokeswoman Laura Brown.
The last radio contact with the pilots was clearance for take-off, she said.
"The plane is so destroyed there's not much to see," said Charlotte police spokesman Keith Bridges. "It's just a horrible sight." The plane veered into the hangar and came down on its roof, witnesses told WCNC-TV. Video from the scene showed smouldering wreckage and a charred side of the hangar. Airport director Jerry Orr said there were no survivors aboard the plane. However, three people on the ground who were thought to have been missing had been accounted for.
There was no immediate indication of terrorism, the FBI said. At Greenville-Spartanburg airport, a room had been set up for friends and relatives arriving to pick up passengers from the flight, airport spokeswoman Rosylin Weston said. The plane was about eight years' old and had 15,000 hours of flight time and 21,000
take-offs and landings, said Jonathan Ornstein, chief executive of Mesa Airlines, which owns Air Midwest.
A maintenance alert had been issued in August for the same model of airplane after attachment bolts for the vertical stabiliser were found loose on a plane during a scheduled inspection. Maintenance records on the plane that crashed weren't immediately available.
"We clearly are deeply concerned about this event, about our crews and our passengers," Ornstein said from the company's headquarters in Phoenix. "I can only express our greatest sympathy, my personal sympathy, to all those involved." The crash comes after a year in which there were no deaths aboard a passenger or cargo airliner in the US. It had been the third time in a decade that a year went by without a fatality on a commercial plane.
