[Gene Randall, Cnn Anchor:] A turbo-prop plane crashed today. It happened near Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, killing at least 19 people aboard. CNN's Carl Rochelle is here. He is a certificated commercial pilot. He's been working this story for us all day. Carl, what can you tell us?
[Carl Rochelle, Cnn Aviation Correspondent:] Gene, it was a Jetstream 31. It's an aircraft that you see very often in commuter operations. It's a twin-engine turbo-prop plane. It can carry 19 passengers and a crew of two. In this case, it was carrying 17 passengers and a crew of two. The flight originated in Atlantic City. They were trying to land at the Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, Airport. Now, they were on their second instrument approach. And by instrument approach, it means they were having to use the instruments within the aircraft to try to approach the airplane the airport when the plane went down. It went down about nine miles south of the airport, which means it was just outside of the edges of that particular instrument landing systems approach. Now sources say that the weather at the time of the accident was roughly 1,500 feet of heavy cloud cover and some scattered clouds all the way down to 300 feet above the ground. I checked the approaches for that particular approach at the Wilkes-Barre airport, and when you can descend, the altitude you can descend to off of the ground is roughly 300 feet, so the clouds were right down at the end of that. But that may not have been the problem. The problem may have been some problem with the engines. The crew of the plane apparently reported to the tower that they were having an engine problem. Sources tell me they believe that the crew lost both engines, that both engines shut down on them or went out or stopped running for some reason, and that one of them was re-started, but that wasn't enough, and the airplane ultimately went down. Officials on the scene say there was a ball of fire when they went to the crash scene, and the National Transportation Safety Board is in the process right now of putting together a go team that's a team of investigators to go to the scene and examine the cause of the crash. We do expect to hear from them sometime within the next half- hour, even less, member George Black, the board member who is going to head the investigation into this crash, to give us a take on what they know Gene.
[Randall:] And, Carl, what's the priority for this investigation? What happens first?
[Rochelle:] Well, the first thing is to absolutely be sure that there are no survivors. Now, we do not believe there were survivors, but to ensure that no one survived the crash. Then they need to secure the scene of the crash and go in. It is very important for them in an investigation to see exactly how everything fell when it hit the ground. By that they can tell a lot about how the plane went apart. Now we know there were engine problems. They will try to recover the engines, and they will take those and put them up on test stands, try to see if they run, try to see if there was fuel, if there was no fuel in the fuel tanks. They'll examine that. They'll try to see what it was that caused problems with the engines and why the plane went down, and more about where it was going and what it was doing.
[Randall:] All right, Carl, thanks very much. And when the NTSB holds its press conference, we plan to carry it live.