Eight killed in Colorado plane crash
PUEBLO, Colo. – A small jet owned by electronics retailer Circuit City crashed in freezing drizzle Wednesday as it approached a southern Colorado airport, killing all eight people aboard, including four company employees.
Two witnesses told investigators they heard loud popping noises from the twin-jet Cessna Citation C-560 shortly before the crash at about 9 a.m., Pueblo County Sheriff Dan Corsentino said. The cause of the crash was unknown.
“I don’t have any idea why it went down. It is just an unfortunate thing,” sheriff’s spokesman Steve Bryant said. A National Transportation Safety Board official was at the scene and a team of investigators was expected to arrive late Wednesday.
FAA spokesman Mike Fergus said the pilot was relying on the plane’s instruments to make the Pueblo airport approach because of poor weather. The National Weather Service reported low clouds, fog and freezing drizzle with visibility of about six miles at the airport at the time. The temperature was 27 degrees.
In 1998, the FAA required operators of several Cessna models, including the one that crashed Wednesday, to add a warning to their flight manuals that flying in freezing drizzle and other conditions “may result in ice build-up on protected surfaces exceeding the capability of the ice protection system.”
Aviation analyst John Nance said freezing drizzle is risky because it makes it easy for ice to form on the wings, which adds weight and can affect the plane’s handling.
“You can overwhelm almost any airplane, even a 747 if you get into certain types of icing,” said Nance, a pilot and author based in Seattle.
The victims included a pilot, co-pilot and six passengers, Corsentino said. The flight originated in Richmond, Va., home of Circuit City Stores Inc. Fergus said Pueblo was the plane’s destination, but Corsentino said the aircraft was stopping to refuel before heading to Irvine, Calif.
Another company plane landed safely just before the crash; the model of that plane was not immediately available.
Paul Czysz, a professor emeritus of aviation and engineering at St. Louis University, said weather conditions could have changed quickly enough to affect the second plane but not the first.
The eight people aboard the aircraft that landed safely stood or sat in a lobby at the airport, many with sad expressions. None had any immediate comment.
Circuit City, the nation’s No. 2 chain of consumer electronics stores, said four of the victims were company employees. The company said no executives were killed, but released no other details pending notification of next of kin.
The plane went down about five miles east of the airport, about 110 miles south of Denver, on sagebrush-dotted grassland between Pueblo and the Army’s sprawling Pueblo Chemical Depot.