At least seven people are dead after a Sunday night plane at Bangor International Airport.
Details are still scant, but we know that the fixed-wing, multi-engine Bombardier Challenger 600 crashed about 7:45 p.m. shortly after takeoff, ended up upside down and then caught on fire.
Just one person of the eight aboard survived the crash and suffered serious injuries. The survivor was a member of the private plane’s crew, according to the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration.
The plane was registered to Houston-based KTKJ Challenger LLC. But few other details were immediately known about those on board.
Sunday’s fatal crash comes just months after the August crash of a single-engine Cessna A185F that left 74-year-old Italian aviator Luigi Accusani dead, making it the second fatal civilian aviation disaster in Bangor and the third ever in the Queen City. A Sept. 17, 1944, military plane crash left its two-man crew dead in Bangor.
While the investigation is ongoing, and a team from the National Transportation Safety Board and FAA was expected to arrive in the Queen City later on Monday, the crash will go down among the deadliest aviation disasters in Maine’s history. That’s based on a Bangor Daily News review of record military plane crashes dating back to 1941 and NTSB reports dating back to 1964.
The deadliest plane crash in Maine happened on July 11, 1944, when a U.S. Army A-26 Invader, with a crew of two, crashed in South Portland, where it encountered heavy fog. The plane crashed in a trailer park located in what’s now the city’s Red Bank neighborhood and housed shipyard workers.
Both crew members and 17 people on the ground died.
The next deadliest crash happened on May 30, 1979, when a DeHavilland Twin Otter passenger plane crashed near Rockland while en route to Knox County Regional Airport in Owls Head from Boston.
The crash left 17 dead, and 16-year-old John McCafferty was the sole survivor. He suffered a broken arm and leg, and his scalp was torn from his forehead.
Investigators later faulted pilot error and the management of Downeast Airlines, which operated the plane.
The same day as the South Portland disaster, a B-17 Flying Fortress crashed in the mountains west of Rangeley while flying from Kearney Army Air Field in Nebraska to Dow Air Force Base in Bangor.
All 10 crew members aboard the bomber died.
A little more than a year earlier, on June 26, 1943, a B-26 bomber with a five-man crew was flying over Caribou during a trans-Atlantic flight that morning when it went down in open field where four adults and a 9-year-old boy were working on a farm loading rocks on horse-drawn wagons.
The crash killed the bomber’s entire crew and four of the five people on the ground, including the child.
On the night of Aug. 25, 1985, a Bar Harbor Airlines flight with two crew members and six passengers left Boston for Auburn. Weather was poor at the time, and witnesses reported at the time that the plane wasn’t on a normal flightpath on its approach to the municipal airport in Auburn.
One witness described the plane as suddenly dropping “very quickly as a helicopter would do” before disappearing from view and hearing two explosions that another witness described as “like napalm.”
The crash, and subsequent fire, destroyed the plane and killed all those aboard.
About seven years earlier, on Sept. 22, 1978, a U.S. Navy P-3 Orion with an eight-man crew left Brunswick Naval Air Station bound for Trenton, Ontario. But about 10 minutes into the flight witnesses reported seeing one of the plane’s engines break loose, causing an “incredible big boom and a huge ball of fire.”
The plane went down near Poland, and there were no survivors.
Two decades earlier, on July 29, 1958, a B-52D Stratofortress on a training flight near Loring Air Force Base in Limestone when, on a second pass, it gained altitude and a newspaper editor reported hearing an explosion. The plane went down in a field near Noyes Road.
Only one member of the crew survived by parachuting to safety. The other eight crew members perished in the crash.
At least four other military plane crashes claimed seven lives between 1942 and 1963. No other civilian plane crashes left more than six dead.
Of the 144 civilian plane crashes on record with the NTSB between 1964 and 2025, 67 claimed just one victim and just 28 had more than two victims.
