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.