An upstate New York plane crash that claimed the lives of 50 people reverberated some 300 miles away to Northern Virginia, where the family business that operated the plane still bears the name of Virginia’s senior state senator.
Sen. Charles Colgan, the Senate’s 82-year-old finance chairman, had founded Colgan Air in 1965 with 16 investors and sold the Manassas company in 2007. He rushed back from Richmond on Friday morning after learning that Continental Connection Flight 3407 had crashed in a Buffalo suburb the previous night.
Colgan Air had operated the plane, a Bombardier Dash 8 Q400, for Continental. Colgan told the Associated Press on Friday he knew the four-person crew killed in the crash, though he no longer had a role in the small airline’s operations. Colgan Air still employs his son.
“They started the airline … up until it was sold they were obviously a big part of aviation here in Virginia,” said Juan Rivera, director of the Manassas Regional Airport, where Colgan Air is headquartered.
Rivera said the airport’s interaction with Colgan Air has been limited since Pinnacle Airlines Corp. bought the company.
The plane reportedly nose-dived into a Clarence, N.Y., house, killing the crew, one off-duty crew member, 44 passengers and an occupant of the home. It matched the scope of the last large-scale U.S. air disaster, the crash of Comair Flight 191 in Kentucky in 2006, which killed 49 people.
Colgan Air and Pinnacle have had two deadly accidents since 2003, according to the National Transportation Safety Board’s online accident database. Neither of the crashes involved passengers.
A Colgan Air flight went down in water near Yarmouth, Mass., in August 2003, killing both pilots. The NTSB blamed the crash on faulty maintenance work and the crews’ failure to follow proper check-list procedures that caused a loss of in-flight control.
About a year later, a Pinnacle flight crashed into a residential area south of Jefferson City, Mo., killing the two pilots. The report from that accident blamed “the pilots’ unprofessional behavior, deviation from standard operating procedures, and poor airmanship.” The pilots had sought to climb the plane to its maximum altitude of 41,000 feet, stalled the engines and were unable to restart them.
