Pilgrim Airlines Flight 458 was a scheduled United States passenger air commuter flight from LaGuardia Airport in New York City to Logan Airport in Boston, Massachusetts, with stopovers in Bridgeport, New Haven, and Groton, Connecticut. On February 21, 1982, the de Havilland Canada DHC-6-100 operating the flight made a forced landing on the frozen Scituate Reservoir near Providence, Rhode Island, after a fire erupted in the cockpit and cabin due to leakage of flammable windshield washer/deicing fluid. One passenger was unable to escape the aircraft and died of smoke inhalation, and eight of the remaining nine passengers, as well as both crew members, received serious injuries from the fire and crash-landing.
== Accident == The three legs of the flight from LaGuardia to Groton were uneventful. At Groton, the flight crew who had flown the first three legs handed off the aircraft to the flight crew for the final Groton-Boston leg, and flight 458 took off from Groton at 3:10 p.m. Eastern Standard Time. About 15 minutes later, while flying over northwestern Rhode Island, 27-year-old First Officer Lyle Hogg, observing light icing on the windshield, activated the windshield washer/deicer system twice, to little apparent effect; during the second deicing attempt, Hogg smelled alcohol, which prompted him to stop the deicing. Shortly afterwards, smoke started entering the cockpit around the base of the control column. 36-year-old Captain Thomas Prinster, contacted air traffic control, declared an emergency, and requested and received radar vectors direct to T. F. Green Airport, which serves Providence, for an emergency landing; the airport's emergency crews were called up to assist the aircraft upon its arrival. The smoke in the cockpit rapidly thickened to the point that the pilots could not see their cockpit instruments or each other and had to open their side windows for visibility and air. Fire broke out in the cockpit and forward cabin as the aircraft descended from its cruising altitude of 4,000 feet (1,200 m), badly burning Prinster, Hogg, and, to a lesser degree, two passengers who attempted unsuccessfully to extinguish the cabin fire. Passengers described the fire in the cabin as "roll[ing]" or being like a "flaming river". The heat of the fire melted the flight crew's audio headsets, forcing them to be discarded. During the emergency descent, one of the two passengers who attempted to fight the cabin fire, off-duty USAir flight engineer Harry Polychron, used a tennis racket to break cabin windows to try and clear smoke from the passenger cabin.
At 3:33 pm, unable to reach the Providence airport in time, Captain Prinster made a forced landing on the foot-thick ice of the western arm of Scituate Reservoir, 12.5 miles (10.9 nmi; 20.1 km) west-northwest of the airport, with the right wing and left main landing gear breaking off upon impact. The flight crew and nine of the ten passengers managed to evacuate the burning aircraft and walk to shore. The tenth, a 59-year-old New Hampshire woman with severe chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and marked atherosclerosis, was overcome by smoke and toxic gas before she could escape. The first police and fire units reached the site of the accident at about the time the survivors of the crash reached the shoreline. All of the victims were taken to Rhode Island Hospital in Providence, a trauma center, for medical attention. Of the eleven survivors, all but one sustained serious injuries in the accident; most of the passengers received blunt-force injuries of varying severity in the hard landing, and the flight crew and two passengers were burned by the inflight fire: Captain Prinster received second-to-third-degree burns over 50 to 70 percent of his body surface and spent months in hospital, but ultimately survived; First Officer Hogg, although also suffering second-to-third-degree burns, was burned less extensively, due both to his wearing thicker clothing and to the fire being…