Houston, We Have a Problem

They're going to bring everybody in on two six or two seven. Continental Express flight twenty five seventy four and its eleven passengers nears the end of its one hour flight from Laredo to Houston Texas. It's the second flight of the day for this crew. They have already flown from Houston to Laredo. Now they're on their way back. Fifteen thousand feet below, it's a warm late summer morning on the farms and cattle ranches of southern Texas. Captured on the right. The pilots prepare the Embraer 120 Brasilia for another routine landing. Captain Brad Patridge is just twenty nine years old. Forty three year old first officer Clint Radosevich is very close to becoming a captain himself. They're less than 70 miles from Houston. Home for both pilots. Pushing this descent, making like the space shuttle. In the blink of an eye, the plane is plummeting towards the ground. It drops two thousand feet in just a few seconds. Far below, Cary LeBay and his brother Clifton are working on their farm. My brother and I heard the explosion. We both looked up in the air and it was oh my God. Seen a plane coming out of the air. The plane was spiraling. Flight 2574 plummets to the ground at more than 300 miles an hour. Ten bodies were found inside the wreckage, four outside. All 14 people on board, including Patridge and Radosevich, are dead. The NTSB blames the accident on the failure to reinsert all the screws holding the left leading edge to the tail. My heart reached out to the people that had worked on the airplane because I knew this was a human error. And whoever had been involved in that maintenance, I'm sure was going to feel very badly about the situation. The safety board also takes the unprecedented step of faulting Continental Express for not making sure all maintenance procedures were followed.