http://www.chron.com/cs/CDA/story.hts/topstory2/1728824 CHARLOTTE, N.C. -- A commuter plane carrying 21 people crashed into a maintenance hangar as it was taking off today at Charlotte/Douglas International Airport. There were no survivors, an airline spokesman said. "The plane is so destroyed there's not much to see," said police spokesman Keith Bridges. "The debris is in such bad shape." Nineteen passengers and two crew members were on Air Midwest Flight 5481, a Beech 1900 twin-engine turboprop departing for Greenville-Spartanburg, Federal Aviation Administration spokeswoman Laura Brown said. Jonathan Ornstein, a spokesman for Mesa Airlines, which owns Air Midwest, told CNN that everyone on board the plane was killed. CNN reported that two people on the ground whose fate was unknown had been accounted for. The plane crashed as it was taking off in clear, windy weather just before 9 a.m. The last radio contact with the pilots was clearance for takeoff, Brown said. The plane veered into the hangar, authorities said, and witnesses told WCNC-TV it came down on its back. Video from the scene after the crash showed smoldering wreckage and a charred side of the hangar. Randy Parker, a witness, was getting out of his vehicle at the airport when he saw the plane apparently losing altitude before the crash. "It's just a horrible site," he said. "It's just horrible." The plane was about 8 years old and had 15,000 hours of flight time and 21,000 takes offs and landings, Ornstein said. Last year, no one died aboard a passenger or cargo airliner in the United States, the third time in a decade that a year went by without a fatality on a commercial plane, according to the FAA.
