| Occurrence summary | |
|---|---|
| Date | June 17, 1979 |
| Type | Controlled flight into terrain |
| Site | Camp Greenough, Yarmouth Port, Yarmouth, Massachusetts, United States |
| Passengers | 8 |
| Crew | 2 |
| Injuries | 4 or 5 |
| Fatalities | 1 (Pilot)[1] |
| Survivors | 9 |
| Aircraft type | de Havilland Canada DHC-6 Twin Otter 300 |
| Operator | Air New England |
| Tail number | N383EX |
| Flight origin | LaGuardia Airport, New York, New York, United States |
| Destination | Barnstable Municipal Airport, Barnstable County, Massachusetts, United States |
Air New England Flight 248 was a commercial airliner that crashed on approach to Barnstable Municipal Airport in Barnstable County, Massachusetts, on June 17, 1979. All of those on the plane survived with the exception of the pilot, who was killed instantly.
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At 10:48 p.m. EDT on June 17, 1979, Flight 248, with eight passengers and a crew of two, crashed in a heavily wooded area in the Yarmouth Port section of Yarmouth, Massachusetts, about 1.5 miles (2,4 km) northeast of Barnstable Municipal Airport while on an instrument landing system (ILS) approach.[1] The crash occurred on the end of a flight from LaGuardia Airport in New York, New York. The plane, piloted by Air New England co-founder George Parmenter, was several miles short of the runway.
The plane crashed in the middle of Camp Greenough, a heavily wooded Boy Scouts of America camp. Parmenter was killed in the crash. The co-pilot and several passengers were injured.
One passenger, 19-year-old Suzanne Mourad, who was not injured, managed to make her way through the thick brush to the Mid Cape Highway (Route 6) and flagged down a passing motorist. The motorist drove her to the airport, where she alerted authorities to the crash. Rescuers, with the aid of a brush-clearing truck were able to cut a swath through the brush to the crash site, and aid the survivors.[2]
The crash was blamed on pilot fatigue, causing the flight crew to fail to recognize and react in a timely manner to a gross deviation from acceptable approach parameters, resulting in a continuation of the airliner's descent well below the decision height during a precision approach without visual contact with the runway environment.[1]
In June 2009, author Robert Sabbag, who was one of the passengers on board Air New England Flight 248, released a book called Down Around Midnight (Viking Adult, ISBN 978-0-670-02102-4), a first-hand account of the crash from survivors and rescuers.[3]
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