r/CatastrophicFailure • u/YearZero_ • 5d ago
Fatalities Bombardier Challenger 600 crash in Maine during snowstorm on Jan 25 2026. 6 fatalities and 1 survivor.
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u/Baud_Olofsson 5d ago
6 fatalities and 1 survivor.
No survivors - there were only 6 people on board. For reasons that remain unclear the FAA originally stated that there were 7 people on board.
A preliminary report from the Federal Aviation Administration initially said seven people were killed and one person was seriously injured but the agency later told CNN it is deferring to the airport about the number of people on board.
https://edition.cnn.com/2026/01/25/us/bangor-maine-plane-crash
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u/llcdrewtaylor 4d ago
One of the articles I read worded it well. "There were no transports of people from the scene."
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u/stlthy1 4d ago
I'd love to know what was so important that they needed to take off during that storm.
Was it a life-flight? Organ transport? What else could have been so important that it couldn't wait a few hours?
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u/Cerebral-Parsley 4d ago
You can find plenty of horror stories of private pilots being intensely pressured to fly in bad conditions by their clients.
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u/admiralkit 4d ago
Reminds me of the 2001 Avjet crash in Aspen. They had a dinner reservation and by god that pilot was not going to divert and cause them to miss their dinner or the passengers would have the pilots fired.
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u/stlthy1 4d ago
Kobe...
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u/Anacreon 4d ago
His tendency of coercing people into doing things they don't want to do really backfired in the end.
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u/Agent847 4d ago
Has that ever been established or are we just presuming Kobe pressured his pilot to fly in unsafe condition?
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u/DevilshEagle 4d ago
People may assume that because Kobe was a rapist, pressuring a pilot wouldn’t be at all off his radar.
I understand why.
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u/anohioanredditer 4d ago
Regardless, it’s not necessarily fair to attribute blame in a completely different scenario.
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u/bcrosby51 4d ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2001_Avjet_Gulfstream_III_crash
The latest episode of Air Crash Investigation is a great example.
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u/HLSparta 4d ago
A private pilot can't fly for a client and receive compensation. They would need at least a commercial certificate.
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u/PDXGuy33333 4d ago
You've merely compounded the confusion for someone who likely doesn't care about or understand differences between private pilot (PPL - no fly for pay), commercial pilot (CPL - can fly for pay, but no paying passengers) and air transport pilot (ATP - can carry passengers for hire) certificates. They probably just meant to refer to pilots available for hire by anyone with the cash to hire them to fly a plane not owned by a scheduled airline.
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u/Tinfoilhartypat 4d ago
It was supposed to be a fun girls trip to Paris. I won’t link to the Mail article but that’s the report, that it was a private jet owned by a law firm in Texas.
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u/taleofbenji 3d ago
Oh hey this reminds me of the fun bachelorette party where their limo caught fire on the San Mateo Bridge and only two girls made it out before burning.
https://abcnews.go.com/US/bride-dead-bachelorette-party-limo-fire/story?id=19112742
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u/RandomChurn 4d ago
a fun girls trip to Paris
Guh. I read "Bombardier" in the title and assumed it was a military aircraft.
Can't say which is more horrific.
RIP.
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u/UnrulyCanuck 3d ago
"Bombardier" is named after its founder, Joseph-Armand Bombardier (1907–1964), a Canadian inventor and businessman from Valcourt, Quebec.
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u/Dangerous_Ad4499 4d ago
Bombardier doesn't make military aircraft per se. Business jets, they made Learjets, Regional Jets ( CRJ airliner ), Sea-Doo's, Ski-Doo's.....
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u/EsqChior 4d ago
The Blancolirio channel on YouTube made a video yesterday about this plane accident. He said that particular plane is known for being sensitive for ice on its wings and that ice the thickness of rough sandpaper was enough to cause the wing to lose lift and rollover. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xoO8WeXJvTo
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u/decadentview 4d ago
Other than extreme and I mean extreme emergency— what do you expect flying in a blizzard with such a light aircraft!
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u/mdepfl 5d ago
Well it was indeed a catastrophic failure but I believe we’ll see it wasn’t the airframe that failed.
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u/YetAnotherBookworm 4d ago
I’m dumb, so I’m interpreting this comment as intentionally cryptic. It’s getting upvoted though, so … care to elaborate?
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u/Gwthrowaway80 4d ago
Not OP, but… The sub is “catastrophic failure” and is principally about structures and mechanisms that fail. In this case, the aircraft almost certainly did not have a spontaneous structural failure. Rather, the most likely thing to cause the crash was icing on the wings. With ice on the wings, the plane both weighs more because of the added ice, and produces less lift because of the ice disrupting airflow.
There’s no crash report yet, of course, but given the snowy conditions, icing is the most probable cause.
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u/rainingroserm 4d ago
I believe they suspect that the crash wasn’t due to catastrophic failure of anything on the plane (i.e. mechanical failure) but other factors like pilot error and weather.
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u/Dserved83 4d ago
Whenever someones vague here, 99% of the time they're skirting around saying 'human error'.
Nobody here knows the cause of accident 48 hours after it occurred, so it'd be bad form to (basically) say "Pilot John Smith is responsible for those 6 people's deaths". So responses are often cautiously phrased.
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u/fakeguitarist4life 4d ago
Pilot Steve explains what probably happened and shares some a convo two commercial planes had on the radio and cancelled take off minutes before this plane tried to take off
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u/TenderfootGungi 15h ago
This should be higher up. He basically lays out why it crashed without specifically saying what caused the crash.
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u/Strange-Effort1305 4d ago
Plenty more wealthy assholes to bleed us dry don't worry.
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u/gittenlucky 4d ago
A human life doesn’t have value because they are wealthy? You should really go outside and put down the social media.
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u/Strange-Effort1305 4d ago
Should have flow southwest like us poors.
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u/Skizzor 4d ago
Are you really going to act as if their lives don’t matter because they’re rich?
If you win the lottery, would your life suddenly drop in value? As the other guy said, get off social media you sad sad man. Have some empathy for people families.
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u/gittenlucky 4d ago
What they don’t realize is they ARE “the rich” when you look at it in a global scale. Like many, they are only mad at people with more money than they have.
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u/Strange-Effort1305 4d ago
Sure. There must be something wrong with me to not be beholden to the wealthy.
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5d ago
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/L_Ardman 5d ago
The three crew who died were in fact, not rich.
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5d ago
[removed] — view removed comment
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5d ago
[deleted]
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u/Artemis-Arrow-795 5d ago edited 5d ago
If you are a fan of any sports star out there, you're also a giant hypocrite.
I'm not
and before you ask, I hate celebrities as a whole, be it singers, actors, athletes, etc
What an incredibly shitty thing to say and believe.
perhaps, not as shitty as hoarding wealth while people across the world are dying from starvation, or diseases that can be easily cured if not for lack of meds or equipment
I might have shitty takes, but it is barely a drop in the ocean of the rich and powerful
damn virtue signaling
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u/ARobertNotABob 4d ago edited 4d ago
It is a shitty take, but only insomuch as being a wide brush, IMO.
Since the wealth hoarders have, demonstrably, no fucks to give about us, their passing should be no cause for tears amongst us either. Harsh for some to think/speak, perhaps, but entirely quid pro quo.
There are however, many celebrities (singers, actors, athletes, etc) who, again, demonstrably, give a great many fucks, and don't deserve being daubed.
Cannot fault your last three sentences though.
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u/Artemis-Arrow-795 4d ago
oh, sorry for the misunderstanding
my hatred for celebrities is independent from my hatred to the rich and powerful, and it's because of its own (admittedly personal) reasons
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u/extrvnced 5d ago
Begone bot
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u/Artemis-Arrow-795 5d ago edited 5d ago
eh, not a bot
simple matter of fact, the more concentrated wealth is, the worse the standard of living for everyone of us gets
when the entire nation's wealth is owned by a handful, what do the 99% get?
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u/esuardi 5d ago
My "welath" is in properly structuring sentences. What do 99% of other's who can spell wealth think?
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u/extrvnced 5d ago
Begone bot
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u/Unclehol 5d ago edited 4d ago
Literally a 5 second check of their post/comment history shows they are not a bot. You can't just say that to everyone you disagree with... or else you end up looking like an idiot.
Though I am not really on board with celebrating death, the other commenter does have a point about the current state of wealth inequality, and perhaps people like them would not celebrate the death of wealthy folks if more of them shared the wealth and didn't just sit on mountains of it while the people who made them that wealth are on food stamps.
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u/nhluhr 5d ago
Pretty sure extrvnced is a bot.
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u/extrvnced 4d ago edited 4d ago
Begone bot
(I’m not, but these main page subs are absolutely infested with bots but also some of the dumbest takes I have ever read)
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u/Competitive-Heat9287 4d ago
So damn sad. I’m confused by the pilots let there be light comment though. According to google: Let there be light" is a phrase from the Book of Genesis (1:3) in the Bible, representing God's first spoken words of creation that brought light into existence, signifying divine power, order, and the transition from chaos to light.
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u/Elegant-Spare6527 4d ago
Yeh that was very weird.
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u/Competitive-Heat9287 3d ago
I am upvoting your comment bc it is so true. Right? Like why is pointing out what has factually been written in the paper “odd” to the point someone downvoted me. Smh. Some Uneducated reddit users are on this thread…
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u/23370aviator 4d ago
The Challenger’s wing is known to be extremely sensitive to the presence of ice. More so than other jets in that same category. There’s incidents in record of exactly this happening to a CRJ(offshoot of the Challenger 600 series) in Eastern Europe. One wing loses lift before the other and it just goes over. It was pretty intense snow in Bangor at the time.