Crash jet took off from wrong runway
A commuter jet was on the wrong runway when it crashed just after take-off today and burst into flames, killing 49 people and leaving the lone survivor – a co-pilot – in a critical condition.
Preliminary data from Comair Flight 5191’s data records and the damage at the scene indicate the plane took off from Blue Grass Airport’s shortest runway, a 3,500ft-long strip not intended for commercial flights, National Transportation Safety Board member Debbie Hersmann said.
“We will be looking into performance data, we will be looking at the weight of the aircraft, we will be looking at speeds, we will pull at that information off and we will be looking at all that,” Hersmann said.
The strip, unlit and barely half the length of the airport's main runway, is not intended for commercial flights.
It was not immediately clear how the plane ended up on that runway.
Aviation experts said the twin-engine CRJ-200 regional jet would have needed 4,500 feet to fully get off the ground.
The Atlanta-bound plane crashed through a perimeter fence and crashed in a field less than a mile from the end of that runway at about 6.07am. Aerial images of the crash site in the rolling hills of Kentucky’s horse country showed trees damaged at the end of the short runway and the nose of the plane almost parallel to the small strip.
When rescuers reached it, the plane was largely intact but in flames. A police officer burned his arms dragging the only survivor from the cracked cockpit.
The flames kept rescuers from reaching anyone else aboard – a newlywed couple starting their honeymoon, a Florida man who had caught an early flight home to be with his children and a University of Kentucky official among them.
“They were taking off, so I’m sure they had a lot of fuel on board,” Fayette County Coroner Gary Ginn said. “Most of the injuries are going to be due to fire-related deaths.”
FAA spokeswoman Laura Brown said the agency had no indication that terrorism was involved in any way in what was the country’s worst domestic plane crash in five years.
It’s rare for a plane to get on the wrong runway, but “sometimes with the intersecting runways, pilots go down the wrong one,” said Saint Louis University aerospace professor emeritus Paul Czysz.
The worst such crash came on October 31, 2000, when a Los Angeles-bound Singapore Airlines jumbo jet mistakenly went down a runway at Taiwan’s Chiang Kai-Shek International Airport that had been closed for repairs because of a recent typhoon. The resulting collision with construction equipment killed 83 people on board.
