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A Year After The Glazers' Fatal Plane Crash, NTSB Continues Its Investigation

ntsb.gov

As the one year anniversary of the fatal plane crash that killed a prominent local developer and his wife approaches, the federal agency working on investigating the cause of that accident is still working on its final report.

Saturday marks a year since the turbo-prop plane carrying philanthropists and business people Larry and Jane Glazer went down in the Caribbean Sea, near Jamaica, and an official with the National Transportation Safety Board tells WXXI News their investigation is ongoing.

The couple was flying their plane to Florida, when the French-built Socata aircraft apparently had some sort of mechanical problem, and air controllers lost contact with the plane. The wreckage was discovered in January, and the NTSB has been going over that material.

Air Safety Investigator Stephen Stein says he really can't put a time frame on how long the investigation will take, since each probe depends on a number of factors.

He says the plane did not have a so-called black box, or data recorder, but it did have some equipment on board that could help investigators gather information.

“A flight data recorder in the typical sense, no. It had what’s called non-volatile memory on board which allows us to obtain snapshots of information from certain timeframes.”

Stein says the NTSB has had outstanding cooperation from Jamaican authorities and other agencies involved in the investigation, and he says officials look at a number of factors in accidents like this, including the equipment involved, the weather and other environmental factors and pilot training. Both Glazers were experienced pilots. 

Eventually, when the report is finished, Stein says the NTSB could end up issuing some safety recommendations.

“For the safety board, if during the course of this investigation we do discover any sort of systematic deficiencies or anything like that, (the NTSB)  may move to issue a safety recommendation designed to prevent any sort of similar future accidents.”

Randy Gorbman is WXXI's director of news and public affairs. Randy manages the day-to-day operations of WXXI News on radio, television, and online.