The National Transportation Safety Board said in a hearing Tuesday morning that a "litany of failures" led to a plane crash in Akron last November that left two pilots and seven passengers dead.
Much of the NTSB's ruling focused on the pilots' errors.
Investigators told the board that the pilots did not follow proper procedures and tried to land with an unstabilized approach. The flaps were also set incorrectly and the required checklists were disregarded, the NSTB said.
ExecuFlight flight 1526 crashed into a four-unit apartment building less than two miles from Akron Fulton Airport on Nov. 10, 2015.
The small twin-engine plane crashed into power lines before hitting the apartment building near Mogadore Road. Both the apartment complex and neighboring building caught fire as a result of the crash. No one on the ground was injured.
During the hearing Tuesday, NTSB Chairman Christopher Hart said disregarded procedures leading up to the crash read like "pages from a basic text for preventing accidents."
"In the accident that you will hear about today," he said, "we found a flight crew, a company and FAA inspectors who fell short of their obligations in regard to safety."
The NTSB ruled in the meeting that flight crew mismanagement of the approach and multiple deviations from company standard operating procedure placed the airplane in an unsafe situation and led to an unstable approach without visual contact with the runway. The NTSB also found ExecuFlight had a casual attitude toward compliance with standards, inadequate hiring training and operational oversight of the flight crew.
