altitude and heading in the buffeting winds. Five miles from the airport the aircraft encountered heavy rain and some turbulence. The flight continued descending to , the minimum descent altitude (MDA) for the approach. As the crew began to look for the airport, the aircraft continued descending. At 00:51, winds at Bradley were measured as 170° at , gusting to , with an altimeter setting of and falling rapidly. This information was not transmitted to the Bradley control tower until 00:57 and was not made available to the flight crew before landing. Crash At 00:55, the sink rate alarm went off, followed seconds later by a loud thump as the aircraft began shearing off treetops along Peak Mountain ridge. These trees were on a ridge with a ground elevation of , and the first treetop struck was at a height of . The captain advanced the throttles to full power, but the trees had been ingested into the engines causing them to flame out and shut down. The captain immediately lowered flaps to 40° hoping it would momentarily cause the aircraft to "balloon" upwards. While not standard operating procedure, this worked to a limited extent until the aircraft clipped a tree near the end of the runway. It then impacted the runway 33 ILS antenna equipment at the approach end of runway 15 before rolling to a stop. The accident resulted in one minor injury to a passenger; the other 72 passengers and all 5 crew members escaped without injury. The accident resulted in $9 million in damage to the aircraft and over $74,000 in damage to airport equipment. NTSB investigation The National Transportation Safety Board investigated the accident. The investigation cited several causes for this accident. It faulted the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) for designing the approach to runway 15 without taking the ridgeline into consideration. The new approach, which factors in the terrain, has increased the MDA to . It cited pilot error as the primary cause due to an incorrect altimeter setting combined with the crew's failure to level off at the MDA. The report also noted that because pressure was falling rapidly, the crew should have requested a more recent altimeter setting from the tower—the ATIS broadcast is normally updated hourly or whenever weather conditions change, and the first officer had noted that the ATIS recording was over 90 minutes old. Although turbulence, heavy rain, and