'Like bomb going off': Impact of Melbourne's worst plane disaster in 30 years

[Graham2001]

Melbourne’s worst aviation disaster in 30 years has claimed the lives of five people.

The plane was carrying four American tourists when it slammed into the Essendon DFO, metres from the busy Tullamarine Freeway, and exploded in a fireball.

Link to full article with several witness videos

https://au.news.yahoo.com/vic/a/3445...-yahoo7/#page1

[WildaBeast]

3. The plane’s engine failed resulting in the aircraft crashing into the DFO shopping centre building.

A King Air has two engines. The failure of one of them, in and of itself, should not cause a crash. The engine failure was almost certainly a contributing factor, but something else must have gone wrong in addition to that to result in the crash. That something else could well be that the pilot didn't react properly to the loss of the engine, of course. Would a small plane like a King Air flying for a charter company in Australia have a cockpit voice recorder?

[BoKu]

Probably no CVR. But chances are good that one or more of the airplane's systems collected and logged enough data to reconstruct the flight. What remains to be seen if enough of the system memory survived. The NTSB has an entire department that does nothing but extract data from damaged devices.

[Graham2001]

Here is the link to the ATSB investigation, not much there at the moment, but when it is this will be the place to go:

http://www.atsb.gov.au/publications/...r/ao-2017-024/

And a link to the latest speculation, looks like the media is shifting focus from the engine failure onto how the pilot reacted to it.

The pilot in yesterday’s tragic plane crash, who’s been hailed as a “champion bloke”, was under investigation over a midair “near collision” in 2015.

Max Quartermain, 63, who had more than 38 years’ flying experience, died along with four US golfing tourists yesterday when the plane he was piloting exploded in a fireball after crashing into the Essendon Direct Factory Outlet in Melbourne’s north.

Mr Quartermain has been remembered as a “fine pilot”, but he was involved in a “close shave” less than two years ago.

http://www.news.com.au/national/vict...bad77a17a0d331