In the nation's first fatal commercial plane crash after 2.5 years, a Continental Connection Flight 3407 (Dash-8), operated by Colgan Air, lost altitude while landing at Buffalo NY and crashed into a suburban home out side Buffalo. The crash resulted in 50 deaths (49 on the plane and 1 in the house). The Dash-8 turboprop went down around 10:20pm EST on Thursday. There was some light snow and fog at that time.

 Among the passengers, there was a woman who husband died in the September 11 2001 attacks. 

It was the first fatal crash of a commercial airliner in the United States since Aug. 27, 2006, when 49 people were killed after a Comair jetliner took off from a Lexington, Ky., runway that was too short.

 It is surprising that the fire caused by the crash only affected one house, which could have easily taken down the whole neighborhood.

Bombardier Dash-8 Q400

The Canadian plane Bombardier Dash-8 Q400 which was built in Toronto, Canada and runs on  turbo-prop engines instead of jet engines has not had previous fatal crashes before this incidence.

 In the fall of 2007, Scandinavian Air Systems banned its fleet of Dash-8 Q400s after three landing accidents occurred in a seven-week period.

SAS blamed the accidents on faulty landing gear, though a later investigation into one of the crashes found the landing gear wasn't at fault.

The Bombardier Dash 8 (formerly the de Havilland Canada Dash 8, sometimes abbreviated as DHC-8) is a series of twin-engined, medium range, turboprop airliners. Introduced by de Havilland Canada (DHC) in 1984, they are now produced by Bombardier Aerospace. Since 1996, the aircraft have been known as the Q Series, for "quiet". Over 900 Dash 8s of all models have been built.Bombardier forecasts a total production run of 1,192 units of all Dash8/QSeries variants through the year 2016