11 hours ago, njpilot said:

Having flown in and out of Bradley many times, they have long runways and a few miles to the northwest are 2 airports, Barnes and Westover which have very long runways. As stated before, things can go bad quickly, low and slow on take-off after an engine loss. 

Not criticizing the pilots, but these pilots don't fly this aircraft everyday. I don't know what kind of refresher training they may do and how frequently. I used to go to Flight Safety International and fly a full motion multi-million dollar simulator twice a year and they would give us multiple failures to try and overload us. It is easy to get distracted. 

It's possible the pilots just messed up. Sad. Eventually we'll find out what happened.

According to the latest news reports the pilot had over 7,000 hours in the B-17.

https://www.chron.com/news/us/article/The-Latest-Airman-aboard-B-17-opened-hatch-14489237.php

 

That's a lot of time in type. Again, being low and slow and losing an engine can be challenging in most aircraft. Most likely, we'all find out what happened after the investigation.

From Airliners.net

Quote

According to audio transmissions of the moments before the crash, a pilot said he’d “like to return to the field.”. The controller said, “What’s the reason for coming back?”. “Number 4 engine, we’d like to return and blow it out.”

“You can proceed to runway 6 and you said you need an immediate landing?”. “When you get a chance, yeah.”. “I just want to make sure because we have air traffic coming in can you go or do you need to be on the ground right now?”

The pilot clarified that he needed to land and the controller directed air traffic away from the airport.

(Edit) As it touched down, the airplane "impacted the instrument landing system stanchions, veered to the right, over a grassy area, over the taxiway and impacted the de-icing facility,".

After the crash, the controller calmly said, “Bradley airport is closed for an aircraft incident.”

 

Also, apparently one of the Pax on the plane was doing a facebook stream as they were taxiing. 

I would expect we'd see an episode of "Air Disasters" once the investigation is complete.

Ntsb had their conference.  Crashed on landing about 1k feet short of runway then tipped sideways.

 

b-roll of ntsb people checking out...…..kinda painful to watch knowing the beauty of this aircraft.....