Elevator Move Abnormal Before US Commuter Plane Crashes: Official

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Last updated at: (Beijing Time) Friday, January 10, 2003

Elevator Move Abnormal Before US Commuter Plane Crashes: Official

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A movable control surface on thetail of a US commuter plane was moving abnormally before the planecrashed on takeoff in North Carolina on Wednesday, killing all 21 people aboard, a federal investigator said Thursday.

National Transportation Safety Board member John Goglia told local media that information from the flight data recorder has ledinvestigators to take a close look at the plane's elevator. The equipment, usually attached to the horizontal stabilizer of an aircraft, is used to produce motion up or down.

The data recorder shows the plane took off with its nose up 7 degrees, which is normal takeoff pitch. But the pitch was 52 degrees by the time the plane reached 1,200 feet (about 360 meters).

The US Airways Express/Air Midwest Flight 5481 plane went upside down and struck one side of a hangar at the Charlotte-Douglas International Airport. It carried 19 passengers and two crew members and was bound for the Greenville-Spartanburg airport in Greer, South Carolina, about 80 miles (96 kilometers) away.

The Beech 1900 twin-engine turboprop plane, which was about 8-years-old and had 15,000 hours of flight time, had an elevator tabreplaced at an Air Midwest facility Monday, local media reports said.

The data recorder shows the elevator had moved erratically since then, though seven other flights between the maintenance andthe doomed takeoff may have not been influenced.

The cause of the crash, which came after a year in which there were no commercial airline fatalities in the United States, was not clear and investigators said they were ruling nothing out.

Investigators recovered the flight data recorder and the cockpit voice recorder late Wednesday and sent them to Washington D.C., for analysis, Goglia said.

A maintenance alert for the same type of plane was issued in August saying that attachment bolts for the vertical stabilizer were found loose on one plane during a scheduled inspection.

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