July 24, 2012

New Jersey small plane crash kills 5 people

A family of four, a coworker and a dog were killed Tuesday when a small plane crashed onto a New Jersey highway.

The plane took off at 9:50 a.m. from Teterboro Airport in Bergen County, N.J., and was on its way to DeKalb-Peachtree Airport in Atlanta, according to Federal Aviation Administration spokesman Jim Peters, who said three adults, two children and a dog were killed in the crash on Route 287.

Sometime in between, the pilot of the plane called in icing conditions, but it was not clear whether that caused the plane to spin out in an "uncontrolled descent," apparently breaking up mid-air, Gretz said. Debris from the plane was scattered in a half-mile radius of the leafy Morris Township, N.J., neighborhood.

The plane that crashed was a Socata TBM-700. The plane is a high performance single engine plane turboprop light business and utility aircraft. According to the FAA, a turboprop engine is a type of turbine engine which drives an aircraft propeller using a reduction gear. The plane's engine was PT6A  turboprop manufactured by Pratt & Whitney.

Dewsnup, King & Olsen recently settled a Guatemalan aviation disaster that killed several Utahans and catastrophically injured others against Pratt & Whitney. Pratt & Whitney, a Canadian Company, was the manufacturer of the PT6A-114A turbo-prop engine on the Cessna 208B Caravan plane that crashed in 2008 due, in part, to in-flight engine turbine blade failure.

To read more about the crash go to: http://www.usatoday.com/.

For more information on the Socata TBM-700: http://www.airliners.net/.

For more information on turboprop engines: http://www.pwc.ca/en/engines/pt6a