It was August 9, 2013. A Friday. People in the East Haven neighborhood near Tweed New Haven Airport were just going about their morning, maybe grabbing a second cup of coffee or thinking about the weekend. Then, the sky literally fell. A Rockwell Turbo Commander 690B, a beefy twin-engine light attack-style plane, slammed into two houses on Charter Oak Avenue. It wasn't just a "mishap." It was a tragedy that claimed four lives: the pilot, his son, and two young sisters who were just hanging out in their living room.
When people talk about the New Haven plane crash, they often focus on the immediate horror of the fire. But the NTSB files tell a much more technical, and frankly, frustrating story about what happens when a pilot tries to "thread the needle" in bad weather.
The Approach That Went Sideways
The flight started at Teterboro. Bill Henningsgaard, a former Microsoft executive, was at the controls. He was an experienced flyer, but he was dealing with a ceiling that was hovering right around the minimums for landing. Basically, the clouds were low. Really low.
He was trying to land on Runway 2 at Tweed. Because of the wind and the visibility, he had to execute a GPS approach. On his first try, he missed. It happens. You "go around," climb back up, and try again. But it’s that second attempt where things got weird. Data from the flight recorder showed that the plane started oscillating. It wasn't a smooth glide path. The aircraft was banking left, then right, then left again, struggling to stay centered on the approach path.
Why the "Go-Around" Failed
In aviation, the go-around is supposed to be your safety net. If the landing looks sketchy, you punch the throttle and live to try another day. But Henningsgaard was low. He was dangerously low. According to the NTSB’s final report, the plane’s airspeed started decaying. When you’re flying a heavy twin-engine turboprop like the Turbo Commander, losing speed while you’re low to the ground is a recipe for an aerodynamic stall.
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Imagine trying to balance a plate on a stick while running. If you slow down too much, the plate wobbles. If you stop, it drops. The plane "dropped" because it lost the lift it needed to stay level. It banked steeply to the left—almost 70 degrees—and pitched nose-down. There’s no recovering from that at 100 feet.
The Impact and the Aftermath
The plane hit 64 and 66 Charter Oak Avenue. It didn't just clip them. It decimated them. The fuel tanks ruptured on impact, which is why the fire was so intense. Sade Brantley, 13, and her sister Madisyn Mitchell, only 1, were inside their home. They didn't stand a chance. Neither did Henningsgaard or his 17-year-old son, Maxwell.
Locals still talk about the sound. It wasn't a roar; it was a "thud" followed by a wall of heat. This wasn't some remote field. This was a residential street where kids ride bikes. The New Haven plane crash sparked a massive, years-long debate about the safety of Tweed New Haven Airport (HVN) and whether the runway was too short or the flight paths were too close to homes.
The NTSB Findings: Human Error vs. Machine
Investigators spent months tearing apart those Garrett TPE331 engines. They found nothing. No bird strikes. No engine failure. No mechanical gremlins. The props were rotating at high speed when they hit the dirt, meaning the engines were producing power.
The blame, unfortunately, landed on "pilot's mismanagement of the airplane’s pitch and bank." Basically, spatial disorientation or just plain old task saturation. When you're in the soup (thick clouds), your inner ear tells you you're level when you're actually banking. If you don't trust your instruments—or if you're trying too hard to find the runway lights through the fog—you make fatal mistakes.
Why This Still Matters for New Haven Residents
You can't talk about the New Haven plane crash without talking about airport expansion. For years after the 2013 accident, residents used this tragedy as a rallying cry against lengthening the runways at Tweed. They argued that the airport was squeezed into a space it had outgrown.
But there's another side to that. Pilots argue that a longer runway actually makes the airport safer. It gives you more "room to breathe" if an approach goes wrong. If Tweed had better safety overruns or different approach lighting at the time, would it have changed things? Probably not in this specific case, because the pilot stalled well short of the runway, but the conversation persists.
Lessons Learned from the NTSB Report
If you’re a pilot or just someone interested in aviation safety, the 2013 New Haven plane crash is a case study in "Stability vs. Agility." The Turbo Commander is a high-performance machine. It’s fast. But it’s also "unforgiving" if you let the airspeed get behind the power curve.
- The 500-foot Rule: Most safety experts suggest that if you aren't "stabilized" (on speed, on path, on glide slope) by 500 feet during an instrument approach, you should abort. Henningsgaard kept pushing.
- Weather Minimums: Just because you can legally try an approach doesn't mean you should. The weather that morning was "on the ragged edge."
- Residential Encroachment: This crash highlighted the danger of "Incompatible Land Use." Building houses right at the end of a runway is a 1950s urban planning mistake that we are still paying for today.
The tragedy changed the way the local community views the planes overhead. Now, every time a jet engines roars over East Haven, people don't just hear a flight to Florida; they remember the smoke rising from Charter Oak Avenue.
Moving Forward: Safety Steps for General Aviation
The New Haven plane crash wasn't a freak accident. It was a series of small, bad decisions that stacked up until they became unavoidable. To avoid these types of tragedies in the future, aviation authorities and local municipalities have looked at several key areas.
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First, pilot training for "Low Altitude Stall Recovery" has become a massive focus. You can't just pull back on the yoke when you're falling; you have to push forward to gain airspeed, which feels totally counter-intuitive when the ground is screaming toward you. Second, the FAA has pushed for better "Situational Awareness" tools in cockpits, like synthetic vision that shows a digital map of the ground even when you can't see through the clouds.
For the residents of New Haven and East Haven, safety means keeping a close eye on airport operations. If you live near a municipal airport, it’s worth checking the noise abatement procedures and the specific arrival paths for your neighborhood. Knowledge is the only real defense against the anxiety that comes with living in a flight path.
Check the FAA's "Safer Skies" initiatives if you want to see how they've changed instrument approach requirements since 2013. You can also look up the "Tweed New Haven Master Plan" to see how the airport is currently trying to balance economic growth with the very real safety concerns of the people living next door. Understanding the technical side of the NTSB reports helps strip away the mystery and leaves us with the facts: flying is incredibly safe, but the margin for error at 200 feet in the fog is almost zero.