Safety Board Begins Crash Probe

The death toll from a commuter plane crash on Monday near Atlanta rose to five Tuesday as investigators began combing through the wreckage for clues about what caused the left engine to give out before the crash in a hayfield. Twenty-four people remarkably survived.

Officials from the National Transportation Safety Board said Tuesday that part of a blade had snapped off the left propeller of the Embraer 120 Brasilia aircraft. On Aug. 3 a propeller blade broke off another Embraer 120 Brasilia before it landed safely at Luxembourg Airport. The safety board is helping investigate that incident.

The NTSB started analyzing data Tuesday from the plane’s black box, which holds information on up to 50 facets of the plane’s flight path before it crashed. They also recovered the box that contains the cockpit voice recorder.

NTSB officials said Tuesday night that the recorders showed a loud sound followed by a loss of all power in the left engine. The cockpit voice recorder showed that the pilots “continued to try to solve their problem all the way down to ground impact,” said John Hammerschmidt, a member of the National Transportation Safety Board.

Passengers who survived the flight said they saw the left propeller stopped and missing one of its four blades shortly before the plane crashed, suggesting that the propeller shaft on the left engine was frozen and not free to turn. Typically, propellers spin slowly in the wind when an engine stops in midflight.

Comments from survivors about the propeller make this crash similar to one in April 1991, when an Embraer 120 Brasilia flown by the same airline crashed in Georgia and killed 23 people, including former Sen. John Tower of Texas.

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