Atlas Air cargo jet crashes with three passengers aboard

Bloomberg

An Atlas Air cargo plane with three people aboard plunged out of the sky and crashed into a Texas bay as it was preparing to land in Houston.
The Boeing Co. 767-300, which had departed from Miami, lost radio contact about 30 miles (48 kilometers) from George Bush Intercontinental Airport in Houston, the Federal Aviation Administration said. It fell thousands of feet in seconds after what had been a routine descent, according to the flight-tracking website FlightRadar24.
There were no signs of survivors and human remains were recovered at the scene, the FBI’s Houston office said in a tweet. The FAA cautioned that the count of people aboard the plane was still preliminary.
The plane was nearing a line of thunderstorms in an area of turbulence when it went down, said a person familiar with the still-preliminary data being collected. The person wasn’t authorized to speak about the information. It was flying at about 5,800 feet altitude and there were no signs of trouble before it disappeared, the person said.
Photos and video of the scene show aircraft debris in a shallow, marshy bay. “Who knows what’s under the water that we can’t see, but it looks like total devastation from the aircraft part,” Chambers County Sheriff Brian Hawthorne said, according to Click2Houston.com. “Knowing what I saw, I don’t believe anybody could survive it.”
FlightRadar24 said the plane was operating for Amazon.com Inc.’s Prime Air and posted a photo of the plane painted with Prime’s logo. New York-based Atlas Air said in November it delivered its 20th aircraft in 28 months to Amazon, according to Globe Newswire.
Atlas Air is a subsidiary of Atlas Air Worldwide Holdings Inc. Atlas specializes in leasing aircraft complete with pilots and maintenance to other companies. The holding company also operates Polar Air Cargo, Titan Aviation and Southern Air, according to its website.
The plane’s final seconds were far outside the norm for commercial jets, according to FlightRadar24. After flying level at about 6,000 feet altitude, it began a sudden drop at 12:38 p.m. local time, according to instruments on the plane that were monitored by FlightRadar24.
It went from 5,800 feet to about 1,300 feet in about nine seconds, according to the website.