Accident Details
On February 21, 1982, Pilgrim Airlines Flight 458, a scheduled commuter flight from New York's LaGuardia Airport to Boston Logan Airport with intermediate stops, operated a de Havilland Canada DHC-6-100 aircraft. The first three legs of the flight were uneventful. At Groton, Connecticut, a new flight crew took over for the final leg to Boston. The aircraft departed Groton at 3:10 p.m. Eastern Standard Time.
Approximately 15 minutes later, while flying over northwestern Rhode Island, First Officer Lyle Hogg, aged 27, observed light icing on the windshield. He activated the windshield washer/deicer system twice with little effect. During the second activation, Hogg smelled alcohol and stopped the deicing. Shortly thereafter, smoke began entering the cockpit around the base of the control column.
Captain Thomas Prinster, aged 36, contacted air traffic control, declared an emergency, and requested radar vectors to T. F. Green Airport in Providence, Rhode Island. Emergency crews were alerted. The smoke in the cockpit thickened rapidly, obscuring instruments and vision, forcing both pilots to open side windows. Fire erupted in the cockpit and forward cabin as the aircraft descended from its cruising altitude of 4,000 feet. The flames badly burned Prinster and Hogg, and to a lesser extent two passengers who attempted to fight the cabin fire. Passengers described the cabin fire as "rolling" and like a "flaming river". The heat melted the crew's audio headsets.
During the emergency descent, off-duty USAir flight engineer Harry Polychron, one of the two passengers trying to extinguish the fire, used a tennis racket to break cabin windows in an effort to clear smoke.
At 3:33 p.m., unable to reach Providence, Captain Prinster executed a forced landing on the foot-thick ice of the western arm of the Scituate Reservoir, about 12.5 miles west-northwest of the airport. Upon impact, the right wing and left main landing gear broke off. The flight crew and nine of the ten passengers evacuated the burning aircraft and walked to shore. The tenth passenger, a 59-year-old woman with severe chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and marked atherosclerosis, was overcome by smoke and toxic gas before she could escape.
First police and fire units arrived at the site as survivors reached the shoreline. All victims were taken to Rhode Island Hospital. Of the eleven survivors, all but one sustained serious injuries. Most passengers had blunt-force injuries from the hard landing; the flight crew and two passengers suffered burns. Captain Prinster received second-to-third-degree burns over 50 to 70 percent of his body surface and spent months in hospital but survived. First Officer Hogg also suffered second-to-third-degree burns but less extensively due to thicker clothing and the fire's behavior.