Airplane tragedies strike Turkey, North Carolina

The British Aerospace RJ-100 jet that crashed in Turkey was one of 10 such jetliners operated by Turkish Airlines.

Wednesday was a day of tragedy in Turkey and North Carolina, two sites of separate plane crash incidents. In Turkey, a Turkish Airlines flight was carrying 80 people when it went down in foggy weather. The plane had taken off in Istanbul, and it was trying to land at an airport in southeastern Turkey when it went down. Authorities say they do not know yet why the crash occurred, but the country's prime minister says bad weather conditions were the likely cause.

A woman who survived the crash in Turkey said she was ejected from the plane and found herself sitting in the grass near the crash site. She was one of five survivors.

In a separate incident in North Carolina, a smaller commuter plane crashed during takeoff from Charlotte-Douglas International Airport Wednesday, killing all 21 aboard. The pilot contacted the air traffic control tower before the crash, and she reported some kind of emergency. But she was cut off before controllers were able to get details, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) said. "We know there was some sort of catastrophic event that caused her (the pilot) to declare an emergency," said John Goglia, who is leading the investigation into the crash.

RESOURCES • The National Transportation Safety Board  • The Federal Aviation Administration  • CNN.com: Turkish Airlines plane crashes, 75 dead, 5 survivors  • Interactive: Map of Turkey  • Interactive: British Aerospace RJ-100   • CNN.com: Flight 5481 declared emergency before crash  • On the Scene: CNN's Patty Davis  • CNN.com: The Beech 1900, a commuter fleet workhorse

Air Midwest Flight 5481, operating as US Airways Express, took off from Charlotte at 8:45 a.m. and was due to arrive at Greenville-Spartanburg Airport in South Carolina - 75 miles away - at 9:15 a.m. The day was cold and clear with good visibility, but it was also windy.

The Charlotte airport's operations director, Jerry Orr, said the aircraft could not maintain altitude after taking off and veered to the left. According to witnesses, the plane then rolled upside-down, and then dove into the ground near a maintenance hangar. So investigators will be looking very closely at the plane's left, or number one, engine.

If the left engine had failed just as the plane took off, the flight crew would have had to act very quickly and exactly to keep the plane from going into the roll. They would have had to step hard on the rudder pedals to work against the uneven thrust - the forward motion generated by the working engine, versus the lack of that motion by the failing engine.

Afterwards, according to the aircraft checklist, the crew would have had to keep the working engine at full takeoff power while they made sure the blades on the bad engine were feathered, or slicing straight through the air like a knife. Otherwise, the blades on the bad engine would have created so much drag - friction that would have slowed that side of the plane down - that the aircraft would have been impossible to control.

The Beech 1900D turboprop that crashed in Charlotte, North Carolina, was operated by Air Midwest as US Airways Express.

The plane "just barely hit one corner" of the US Airways hanger building, setting it on fire, according to Orr. Airport officials got a call from the facility's tower at 8:49 a.m., "and we were on the scene within two minutes," he said.

Searchers recovered both the flight data recorder and cockpit voice recorder from the crash site in North Carolina and sent them to laboratories in Washington.

The FAA identified the aircraft as a Beech 1900D turboprop. The agency also said that it had put out a maintenance alert on that type of plane last August, telling airlines that a mechanic had found a loose bolt in one of the aircraft that works to stabilize the plane. The alert advised airlines to check the stabilizers on all Beech 1900 aircraft.