Passengers 46 Aircraft type Vickers 745D Viscount Date 18 January 1960 Total fatalities 50 (all) Passenger count 46 | Survivors 0 Registration N7462 Operator Capital Airlines Survivor 0 Crew count 4 | |
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Summary Engine failure, loss of control Site Holdcroft, near Charles City, Virginia Similar Austrian Airlines Flight 901, National Airlines Flight 2511, Eastern Air Lines Flight 375, 1960 Munich C‑131 cra, 1960 Danish football ai | ||
Capital Airlines Flight 20 was a U.S. scheduled passenger flight from Washington, D.C. to Norfolk, Virginia. A Vickers Viscount flying the route crashed into a farm in Charles City County, Virginia, on January 18, 1960. The accident was the third fatal crash involving a Capital Viscount in as many years; the first two were Capital Airlines Flight 75 and Capital Airlines Flight 67.
The plane was cruising at an altitude of 8,000 feet when it encountered icing. This caused two engines to fail. As the craft descended, the other two engines also failed, causing the propellers to autofeather. The crew tried and failed to restart the engines, and were unable to unfeather the propellers normally; they then put the plane into a dive in an attempt to force the propellers from their feathered position. Eventually they succeeded in restarting engine number four. They applied full power to this engine, which caused the craft to enter a circling descent until crashing into trees; at the time of impact it had almost no forward velocity. Five trees were driven through the fuselage, yet their trunks remained intact.
The plane burned for hours after the crash, the police said at the time. They also indicated that they had not been able to approach it to make an effort at recovering bodies. In addition, treacherous underfooting made the use of firefighting equipment almost impossible.
The crash was attributed to the fact that, as per airline policy, the pilots had delayed arming the engine ice protection systems even though they were flying in icy conditions; this caused the engines to lose too much power. Capital Airlines changed its emergency checklist after the crash, deleting the instruction that pilots were to descend to a warmer climate to relight the systems and instructing them that, provided that correct procedure was followed, the engine could be restarted at any height.
Several decades after the crash, the owners of the farm report finding personal items from time to time.