21 killed in US plane crash

A commuter plane crashed and exploded on Wednesday shortly after takeoff from Charlotte Douglas International Airport in North Carolina, killing all 21 people on board, police and US aviation authorities said.

The Beech 1900-D turboprop plane, US Airways Express Flight 5481 operated by Air Midwest, was headed to nearby Greenville/ Spartanburg, South Carolina, when it clipped the corner of a US Airways hangar on the airport grounds and burst into flame, officials and witnesses said.

The twin-engine plane carried 19 passengers and two crew members, airport director Jerry Orr told a news conference.

"There were no survivors," he said.

Three workers on the ground were initially reported missing but were later accounted for and no one in the hangar was hurt, he said.

Aviation officials said the pilot radioed to the control tower indicating an emergency on board moments before the plane crashed but the transmission was interrupted.

National Transportation Safety Board investigators recovered the plane's flight data recorder and said they would send it to Washington for examination.

"We think (we have) the flight data recorder.... The voice recorder is in the same area but it wasn't obvious in the pile of wreckage," said John Goglia of the NTSB.

Witnesses said the plane had just taken off when it appeared to circle back toward the airport. It burst into flames when it crashed shortly before 9 a.m. EST (1600 GMT), sending a thick cloud of smoke over the field.

Orr said the airplane took off to the south and veered left into the hangar. Fire crews doused the flames with foam and charred wreckage could be seen in a 100-foot-long (30-meter) area of debris just outside the hangar.

"It was an intense fire," Orr said.

Witness Benjamin Witkege told the Charlotte Observer he saw the plane rising at an odd angle from the runway.

"The plane was climbing too steep," Witkege said. "I knew it was crashing."

US Airways identified the pilots as Capt. Katie Leslie and First Officer Jonathan Gibbs, both of Charlotte.

It was the first commercial air crash in the United States since an American Airlines jet crashed in November 2001 in New York, killing all 260 people on board and five on the ground.