Continental Connection Flight 3407 Crashes Into Suburban Home | Mayday | On The Move

february the 12th 2009 just outside buffalo new york gear down looks alive gears down jesus christ the airplane entered an aerodynamic stall it did not recover it was it was one of the grisliest nastiest scenes that i think i've seen the crash of continental connection flight 3407 would be one of the ntsb's most important in decades and would see a grieving father fight for changes to the laws governing small airlines i'm focused and determined to change what exists and not have another dance sitting here continental connection flight 3407 operated by colgan air is on route from newark new jersey to buffalo new york it's been a busy flight for captain marvin renslow he's providing guidance to a new first officer rebecca shaw a former flight instructor from seattle shaw's only been with the airline for just over a year she must decide if she now wants to become a captain i don't know what i want to do with the upgrade it depends where i'm based well think of it this way if you stayed on the queue obviously you're not making the captain rate right but you may have a better quality of life with regards to buying a house having a schedule shaw trained to be a first officer on the plane they're flying now a canadian made bombardier q400 it's a twin-engine turboprop popular with regional airlines [Music] the 45 passengers have had a long night their plane was held up for two hours at newark a delay considerably longer than their journey flight 3407 is heading north west over upstate new york the trip is only 53 minutes visibility is poor and there's a forecast of snow and moderate winds in buffalo just some water please elise cowsner is a student at florida coastal school of law in jacksonville she's on her way to visit her family in buffalo she had five nieces and nephews at the time and and uh they had love luncheon at the kids school a couple of the nephews and they both wanted ellie to be their guest any excuse to come home she came home she talked to all of us from newark hey she called us from the uh yeah it's been over two hours she was peeled because of the delay folks from the flight deck your first officer speaking uh it looks like at this time we're about 10 maybe 15 minutes outside of buffalo weather in buffalo is pretty foggy uh snowing a little bit there i'd like to make sure everyone remains in their seats so the flight attendants can prepare the cabin for arrival thank you golden 3407 to send in maintain 2 300. okay down to 2 300. kogan 3407. uh let's do a descent checklist please we can do the approach checklist along with it sure uh bug set set gpws landing flap selected 15 degrees the pilots go through a list of settings for the plane to continue its landing approach [Music] passengers can already glimpse the lights of buffalo suburbs clarence center is on the approach path for aircraft landing at buffalo's airport that gear down looks alive gears down all right flaps 15 extending the flaps provides more lift allowing the plane to slow to its final approach speed suddenly the control column starts to shake the q 400 is slipping out of control captain renzlo struggles to keep his plane flying but it seems to have a mind of its own here the plane crashes into a house at 60 38 long street at air traffic control in buffalo flight 3407 disappears from radar and check colgan there see if he's on you what's his call sign colgan 3407. nope i don't have them you see anything out there nothing all right uh call the fire department i'll never forget the dispatcher's words plane crash house on fire i immediately got my shoes on and my coat on um got in my truck and started heading um down the driveway firefighters don't have far to go 60 38 long street home of the velinsky family is less than a block from the clarence center station as i turned towards the village the whole village was a glow you could see the smoke you could see the flame karen valinsky and her daughter make it out of their house alive but her husband douglas is killed my initial reaction was there's no there was no way that somebody made it out but the ems division reported that they had two people and they were taking them to the hospital and i said which firefighters are they and they said they're not firefighters chief they're survivors from the house i actually physically had to go to the ambulance and look inside for myself to believe firefighters have never seen a blaze like this if you've ever gone to a bonfire and stood five feet from it and you couldn't take it anymore that's what it felt like from 100 feet away the height of it was was just unbelievable obviously because of the fuel that was probably added to it and and the debris area was uh was very large it was uh it was a very very uh horrific site we lived in the town where the plane went down right down the road my son was driving home from a soccer game and uh went right by the plane crash and called me up and said there's a plane down in clarence never really entered our brain that was ellie's plane flight 3407 has crashed eight kilometers short of buffalo airport all 49 passengers and crew are dead including captain marvin renslow and first officer rebecca shaw but many more people could easily have been killed you picture a house and to see a plane on top of this house no more house left no more plane only the tail section you're asking yourself how in in god's creation did this happen and not wipe the whole block out the next call was again from my son and said in fact it was ellie's plane and i said dad there's no survivors uh at which point my wife shrieked and just hit the ground chris said he'd never heard his mother make a sound like that and hope he never does again so that's when he knew that she was gone and that was probably within 45 minutes of the accident the scene in the morning is one of utter devastation i play crookshanks from the ntsb and i start poking around clint crookshanks is one of the first investigators on the case when we arrived on scene there was a fire still burning it turns out it was from a a gas line that had been broken in the house the the firemen would put the fire out and it would re-ignite every couple of minutes it was it was one of the grizzliest nastiest scenes that i think i've seen flight 3407 may have been a small plane but it's the worst crash in the us in more than seven years it will become one of the ntsb's most important investigations [Music] the fire at the crash site of flight 3407 continues to burn preventing investigators from examining the wreckage the airplane had crashed into a house and then it had burned all night long so all the debris was basically in the house our concern is that we're losing evidence it's perishable and if we can't get in there and get the fire out then we're not able to maybe get a hold of evidence that might help us during the investigation clint crookshanks urgently needs to recover the black box flight recorders which could contain valuable clues about the accident we knew that the the recorders were in the tail part of the airplane ordinarily investigators don't go near a crash site that's still burning but if the black boxes can't be rescued they may never find out what brought down flight 3407 we started looking around and and poking around into the wreckage and actually found out where they were okay whoa whoa it's probably in here okay the access panel is on the other side so you're gonna have to cut a hole right there okay the fire department produced a uh a chop saw we were able to cut a hole in the side of the fuselage and go in and grab the recorders and pull them out all right i should do it to the immense relief of all the recorders are undamaged once we took the recorders out of the airplane we put them on the jet and they were flown back to washington dc to our headquarters now investigators are faced with a new hurdle what little is left of the aircraft is hopelessly jumbled together with human remains and debris from the house it all burned and settled into the basement so we had probably 10 feet of debris that we had to dig through in order to recover all of the the airplane authorities wonder how they can salvage any useful evidence from this chaos they get invaluable assistance from an unusual source a group of students learning to process crime scenes is enlisted to separate human remains from the rest of the debris they were graduate students from a local college forensic anthropology students and this was good experience for them to come dig through wreckage like this and look for human remains so landing gear over there please it's dirty painstaking work but it frees up investigators to concentrate on the aircraft ruins we were on our hands and knees with brooms with little shovels scooping out debris identifying it as to house debris or airplane debris and then putting it in different piles the first question for me as a structures engineer is to figure out if the whole airplane made it to the scene of the crash the wreckage is carefully studied to determine if the plane's four corners nose tail and both wingtips are present if we find all four corners of the airplane then we know that there was no in-flight breakup there was nothing that departed the airplane during the flight that may have caused the accident one wing has been consumed by fire the other is shattered into pieces hey have a look at this but investigators are gradually finding what they've been searching for oh yeah this last piece it wasn't until several days into the investigation as we were scraping away some of the debris that we actually found evidence of the left wing and the nose investigators now have all the pieces they need to conclude that the entire plane is at the crash site whatever caused the disaster was not the result of a breakup in flight [Music] the tragedy of flight 3407 is under intense scrutiny at the ntsb offices in washington officials there try to determine if some kind of malfunction caused the crash on this particular accident we knew it was a landing accident so we wanted to check the aircraft's performance and then also we checked for flight control continuity much of this responsibility falls to scott warren my role in the investigation was to be the systems group chairman for the safety board so i was in charge of looking at all of the aircraft systems warren analyzes the aircraft's cockpit voice recorder or cvr to determine if there were any indications of a problem in the cockpit he discovers that six minutes before the crash the crew of flight 3407 had noticed a buildup of ice on the aircraft yeah oh it's lots of ice ice can be a deadly threat to any airplane if an aircraft has ice on it it will have more drag on it so require more power to to maintain a given air speed [Music] i've seen on the leading edges in a long time until a year ago rebecca shaw had no experience with ice on an aircraft i'd never seen ice and conditions never deized never experienced any of that when ice secretes on a wing it adds weight to the airplane but most importantly it changes the shape of the wing and of course it's the shape the curved shape of the wing that actually creates the lip so by changing the lift characteristics of the airplane it makes it less able to fly you know i'd have freaked out like i'd have seen this much i think oh my gosh we were gonna crash [Music] observing that there was ice on the airplane was an important thing to do but then it would be important to turn around and verify that your anti-ice and dei's equipment was on and there was no indication on the voice recorder that they actually rechecked collapse 15. the cvr reveals that only minutes after the crew detected ice a device called the stick shaker went off it was a warning that the plane was about to stall literally to fall out of the sky [Music] shortly afterwards the aircraft did precisely that we know there were icing conditions the only question was were they bad enough to induce this airplane to have a failure ice is now the chief suspect in the crash of flight 3407 if it's ice let's prove it we were all convinced that that we had an icing accident we said yeah it's going to be an icing accident we just got to make sure we look for these few key aspects of icing verify that and and we're good but some of the victims family members are less convinced our initial thought was there was an ice related incident that there was icy night and brought the plane down and as we began to talk to people who knew airline travel who were pilots themselves they would look kind of askance and saying i don't think so that doesn't make sense some investigators share that suspicion scott warren knows a plane like the q400 has a sophisticated de-icing system it's designed to keep ice from building up on the wings and other critical parts of the aircraft to prevent ice accumulating the plane has rubber bladders along the front of the wings called de-icing boots a series of valves uses air from the engines to inflate the boots and crack the ice off the wing those boots are designed to inflate periodically and that inflation breaks off the ice that's accumulated on those leading edges warren now wonders if the crew of flight 3407 actually turned on their de-icing equipment he studies data from the plane's other black box its flight data recorder or fdr it tracks the workings of crucial aircraft systems including the de-icing mechanism we know from the fdr data that the de-icing system had been selected on by the crew and it was on during the majority of the flight and certainly at the end of the flight it was recorded in the on position but now warren needs to figure out if the device was actually working just because the data records that the system is on that's a start but you can't necessarily believe that one piece of information the only way to know is to find what remains of the plane's de-icing system and determine if it was active when the aircraft went down clint crookshag's team hunts for a crucial component of the system the valves excuse me okay everyone i just went for the de-ice valves we you know we said here's what it looks like look for something like this if we can find those valves and we can test them and see if they're operating correctly the valves were very important to us because they are the key component that moves air from the engines where the bleed air originates for the deicing system [Music] okay good five more to go five of the plane's six de-icing valves are eventually recovered some were badly burned some were in fairly good shape and we took those valves and we conducted as much testing on those valves as we thought was appropriate for the level of damage we looked at the level of electrical conductivity and we looked at the pressure testing we looked at a wide variety of things depending on the condition of the valve itself and as far as we could tell all those valves were working properly is that ice on the windshield got it on my side now investigators have to consider the possibility oh yeah oh it's lots of ice that there was so much ice on the wings that the de-icing system couldn't get rid of it fast enough oh yeah that's the most i've seen on the leading edges in a long time it has happened before in roselawn indiana a french-built commuter plane crashed in 1994 after suffering a catastrophic buildup of ice on the wing by analyzing how much power was needed for the plane to maintain its airspeed investigators reach a surprising conclusion basically the aircraft was flying as if it had a relatively small amount of ice on it but a very manageable amount of ice looks normal it was not overloaded it was not excessive if ice didn't bring down the plane something else must have caused it to stall warren studies the q400s operating manual to learn the plane's stall speed the velocity at which it can no longer generate enough lift to stay in the air he discovers that in the conditions flight 3407 was flying through it's roughly 111 knots he now compares the plane's stall speed with its actual air speed just before the stall warning went off 131 knots well above the danger zone [Music] when the stick shaker went off jesus christ they were not necessarily at the edge of assault they were still 20 knots or so away from the stall this new revelation deepens the mystery of flight 3407. if it wasn't stalling why did it fall out of the sky investigators turned their attention to the critical seconds before flight 3407 went out of control they look for clues that could explain why the stall warning went off when the aircraft was flying well within its safety margins they discovered that this plane has a unique feature known as a reference speed switch it governs the sensitivity of the plane's stall warning very few airplanes in my experience have such a switch this airplane is the only one i know that has an actual switch on the overhead panel it was designed by the manufacturer to be an extra safety feature some kind of variable ref speed pilots are supposed to turn on the reference speed switch when they're going to be flying through icing conditions and we'll probably be picking up some ice when in the increased position it reminds pilots to fly faster to counteract any drag effect ice will have on the aircraft when you are in icing conditions and ice does accrue on the wing it can cause the stall speed to go up and so this ref speed switch correspondingly causes the warning to come on sooner or the higher speed what that switch does is it basically uh changes the trigger settings for the stick shaker so we had to ask the manufacturer how does this switch work and what we found was it was part of the system's description that the crews got when they went through training they didn't get a lot of training on how to handle that switch it seemed like it was too simple to worry about investigators need to know if the crew of flight 3407 had turned on the reference speed switch triggering the stick shaker at a faster than normal speed the flight data recorder doesn't show whether the switch was on investigators must find another way of determining its position at the time of the accident glenn here clint crookshanks is given a new priority all right i'll see if we have it recover the ice protection panel from the q400s cockpit where the reference speed switch is housed since the panel was in the cockpit finding it is a challenge most of the front end of the airplane was consumed by fire and so we didn't find anything except for little balls of molten aluminum uh little wire bundles and a lot of ash but after an extensive search crook shanks discovers that the ice protection panel is one of the few pieces of the cockpit that survived bingo however the knobs and switches are barely recognizable crookshanks examines the charred panel to check the position of the reference speed switch it was set to activate stall warnings at higher than normal speeds we did find the ref speed switch in the wreckage and it was in the increased position this discovery only raises more questions the cockpit voice recorder indicates that as renslow was beginning his descent into buffalo he commanded his plane to fly at the normal approach speed but what's strange is that with his reference speed switch on he actually should have been flying faster as this is what the switch would remind him to do so why wasn't he the plane's computer warned the crew to fly faster according to the settings they had configured by displaying a set of red bars on the air speed indicator you may have a better quality of life these bars are meant to warn the pilots that a stick shaker activation is imminent if you're looking at the airspeed indicator you should be aware that you're getting slow and the stall warning may come on jesus christ it seems renslow and shaw were caught off guard still they could have easily corrected the situation once the stick shaker had activated they could have turned the switch off or they could have put the nose down and increased their air speed it's clear to investigators that flight 340c wasn't in danger of stalling when the stick shaker went off so now they need to know exactly what happened after the stall warning was activated an animated simulation of the crash is constructed based on information from the flight recorders [Music] watch what happens just after the stick shaker goes off it illustrates that just after the stick shaker was triggered the plane suddenly pulled up this action dramatically slowed the aircraft and at this point it did stall essentially the airplane entered an aerodynamic stall from which it did not recover it pitched over and hit the ground investigators are dumbfounded flight 3407 wasn't stalling when the stick shaker went off but a few seconds later it was the crew's every action during that brief time now demands careful scrutiny did they do it's a puzzle how could a trained flight crew take a plane that wasn't stalling and in the space of a few moments make it fall from the sky anytime you have an apparent stall for no apparent reason that's a that's a mystery we would expect that no flight crew would install an airliner so the question is why the focus of the investigation now switches from the plane to the crew specifically on the moves they made during the critical seconds after the stall warning sounded we wanted to see if the way they flew the airplane was the way they were trained according to the standard operating procedures that are portrayed in their flight manuals the flight data recorder retains information from more than 1 000 different aspects of the q400 flight operations from the airspeed and altitude to the position of the rudder pedals and throttles it also records the movements of the most critical flight control the control column pilots use the control column to change the position of the elevators and ailerons which manage the direction of the plane the flight data recorder stores information not just about the control column's position but how much force is applied to it as well the fdr records what the control positions were it has sensors built into the control column it has sensors and built into the control wheel what scott warren finds when analyzing the control columns position is stunning in response to the stick shaker captain renslow should have pushed the column forward to bring the nose down and gain speed but for some reason he did the exact opposite we found that the crew instead of pushing forward which is the normal response to a stick shaker uh triggering the crew was actually pulling back on the controls this had the effect of pulling the nose up causing the air speed to drop and tipping the aircraft into an actual stall captain renslow had apparently mishandled one of the most elemental piloting maneuvers how to recover from a stall everything it requires gaining air speed to get out of the red the recovery procedure is fairly simple and straightforward it requires pushing forward on the controls and adding full power at any point in time had the captain pushed forward on those flight controls he had a reasonably good chance of recovering quickly from everything we've gained that stall was recoverable on a repeated number of levels on a repeated basis there was no reason for their plane to go down investigators also learned that first officer shaw in trying to help renslow deal with the crisis inadvertently made things worse she retracted the flaps reducing the amount of lift as the plane struggled to stay in the air had the first officer simply called out you're stalled advance the power push the nose over the airplane would have been able to recover from a human point of view it's sad to recognize that those sorts of things happened and the tragedy that came from that it's concluded that captain renslow's failure to properly respond to the stall warning was the primary cause of the crash of flight 3407 as the issue is now pilot error rather than mechanical failure human performance investigator evan byrne is brought on board his first question why hadn't either renslow or shaw noticed that their airspeed was too low for the icy conditions in this case we can look back towards the fact that there were clear and conspicuous cues of the deteriorating airspeed that were not heated by the captain bern listens to the cockpit voice recording to try to understand what might have led to that home with your oversight to take care of and all that stuff he learns that the crew had been talking throughout the flight the conversation continued during the landing approach it's a violation of a rule known as the sterile cockpit which bans non-essential conversation during critical phases of the fight you're gonna be upgraded in six months quite simply it prohibits conversations that aren't related to the operation of the flight let's do a descent checklist please we can do the approach checklist yeah sure uh bug set vern also discovers that because of the cockpit banter the crew performed critical checklists and briefings late hydraulic pressure and distracted the crew probably didn't see the red bar indicating they were flying too slowly for the conditions the plane had been configured for on approach checklist complete rock and roll when crews deviate from standard operating procedures and perform checklists late or don't make the required call outs they become more vulnerable to subtle mistakes that they may make inadvertently that could lead to startle and surprise or unanticipated events that they have to respond to the evidence is unequivocal the crew of flight 3407 was badly distracted throughout the approach and he said yeah you're gonna be upgraded in six months they had forgotten a key setting they had made that required them to fly faster than normal they had missed indications that they were flying too slow for icing conditions then captain renslow had reacted incorrectly to a stall warning sealing the fate of the plane evan byrne wonders what could have caused a trained airline flight crew to have made such missteps he finds a clue on the cockpit voice recording excuse me the crew was showing signs of fatigue could renslow and shaw have been too tired to function effectively on the flight deck it's a tough question answering it will require tracking their movements during the 72 hours leading up to the crash it's basic gumshoe detective work in the investigation where we're trying to collect as many facts as we can bern interviews the families of the pilots can i speak to mrs renslow please he studies the pilot's mobile phone bills and records of text messages he searches the airline's computer system to determine if and when the crew used it to check their schedules he needs to track their every move and what time did rebecca leave the house we're talking to colleagues or other pilots czech airmen instructors and we ask all those people about the pilots about their recent activities he learns that neither pilot actually lived anywhere near newark but could not afford to stay in hotels on their salaries captain renslow was earning sixty thousand dollars annually at colgan air first officer shaw was being paid less than sixteen thousand dollars a year substantially less than an average bus driver as a result both pilots had made long cross-country commutes to newark captain renzlo from his home in florida and rebecca shaw from seattle washington [Music] in fact shaw had commuted all night from seattle on a cargo flight that connected through memphis captain renslow had spent the night in the airline's crew lounge at newark airport after having already worked two days he was seen sleeping on a couch in the lounge it was against company rules but pilots who couldn't afford housing near the airport did it anyway records show that at 3 10 a.m on the morning of the crash renslow was awake he checked his work schedule on the airline's computer [Music] network next stop buffalo at 7 29 a.m rebecca shaw sent a text message to her husband telling him she'd arrived safely in newark hi honey it's me phone records indicate that later in the morning captain renzlo was on the phone several times rebecca shaw was noticed having a nap catching up on the rest she'd lost flying in the night before [Music] it's not a lot of sleep we ultimately concluded that it was likely that both crew members were experiencing some effects of fatigue at the time of the accident her job is to watch the airspeed her job was to watch the instrument panel and my view was she was fatigued to the point where it's like right here in your soledale i think that's where she was and and he just was not capable he was just he should have been flying an airplane the revelation leads john kausner to become a fierce advocate for changes to the industry he raises awareness among both lawmakers and the public about the need to improve regulations governing pilots at regional airlines this is just saying we support 3407 families their fight for aviation safety and these representatives and congressmen centers have done that for us and we're very appreciative he takes his fight all the way to washington d.c we needed to do something and so we began to advocate in washington weekly every other week i mean we've made innumerable trips down there and immediately the families just jailed we all attended the hearings and uh and began to to say this is what we can do the crash of flight 3407 focused the world's attention on a growing safety problem the relatives of those who were killed will help eliminate that threat the crash of flight 3407 exposed wide-ranging shortcomings in the regulations that govern regional airlines these smaller airlines now make up half of all daily passenger flights in the us their pilots are generally younger less experienced earn less and work long hours their levels of safety are way different from the majors they they have a much lower threshold in training in inability so in pay obviously so they can't attract a higher qualified pilot there are pretty low wages uh pretty difficult working conditions and we don't seem to attract the same level of applicant that we used to some regional airlines get into a bind and they have to hire the first people that meet the minimums in the u.s of the seven fatal accidents involving passenger jets over the past 10 years five have involved regional airlines those include the crash of delta connection flight 5191 in august 2006 which killed 49 people when the crew took off from the wrong runway john kousner's campaign to change laws governing pilots has paid off we relied on your support we need your support you nurture us we want to thank all of you from all of us a year and a half after the crash under pressure from kazna and other victims family members the u.s senate passed a bill which toughens training requirements and forces the faa to draw up new rules on pilot fatigue studies into the problem of overtired pilots are already underway at the university of iowa researchers are developing a system that could help pilots resist fatigue stay engaged with the critical task of flying and prevent future tragedies like that of flight 3407 thomas schnell is a human factors engineer we use a number of neurocognitive and physiological sensors that we apply on on subjects pilots that we invite for our studies he's studying how pilots stay alert on the flight deck as a test subject conducts a cross-country journey in a simulator using sensors he can determine how alert and engaged a pilot really is the research could lead to the development of fatigue detectors on airplanes we are trying to predict uh pilot state so that we can adjust something on the flight deck to prevent the problem from uh getting worse or starting in the first place we monitor brain activity eye movement activity heart the ekg and respiration and and other parameters in in an effort to figure out what the pilots or the crew's state is are they fatigued overworked uh are they disengaged or distracted this section is where they were really uh drowsy and you can see that the gaze has become kind of bored schnell instructs the flight simulator to trigger a major systems failure in the cockpit it's no good everything's dead hydraulic systems have failed claps crank up that heat map so we can see what this brain activity was for impact when a crew is fatigued what you might see is their reaction to events may slow down so you'll see mistakes being made on the flight deck it's precisely these kinds of mistakes on the part of renslow and shaw that ultimately crashed flight 3407 and killed 50 people it's a tragedy that should not have happened that was foreseeable was preventable and it's repeatable if we don't do something about it i'm focused and determined to change what exists and not have another dance sitting here [Music] you

Channel: On The Move

Views: 218,866

Keywords: on the move, cars, planes, trains, documentary, documentaries, full length documentaries, plane documentary, mayday series, mayday, plane disasters, airport, runway, plane pilot, pilot, hd documentary, 2021 documentary, united airlines, plane crash, air accident, air crash, air disaster, plane accident, air emergency, plane disaster, plane emergency

Id: aq8Fh51QBzA

Length: 45min 3sec (2703 seconds)

Published: Wed Aug 04 2021