Plane Carrying 50 Crashes in Kentucky; At Least 1 Survivor
Sunday, August 27, 2006
LEXINGTON, Ky. A Comair flight carrying 50 people crashed a mile from Lexington's airport Sunday morning shortly after takeoff, the Federal Aviation Administration said. At least one person survived.
Comair Flight 5191, a CRJ-100 regional jet with 47 passengers and three crew members, crashed at 6:07 a.m. after taking off for Atlanta, said Kathleen Bergen, an FAA spokeswoman.
There was no immediate word on what caused the crash in a field about a mile from Blue Grass Airport. Light rain was falling at the time. The plane was largely intact afterward, but there was a fire following the impact, police said at a news conference.
The University of Kentucky hospital is treating one survivor, who is in critical condition, spokesman Jay Blanton said. No other survivors have been brought to the hospital, he said.
Fayette County Coroner Gary Ginn said the passengers and crew appeared to still be on the plane and the deaths were caused either by the impact or the "hot fire" on board.
"We are going to say a mass prayer before we begin the work of removing the bodies," Ginn said, referring to the chaplains who serve the airport.
Investigators from the FAA and the National Transportation Safety Board were en route to the scene, FAA spokeswoman Laura Brown said.
The airport closed for three hours after the crash, but reopened by 9 a.m.
Comair is a subsidiary of Delta Air Lines based in the Cincinnati suburb of Erlanger, Kentucky.
The Bombardier Canadair CRJ-100 is a twin-engine aircraft that can carry up to 50 passengers, according to Delta's Web site.
The crash marks the end of what has been called the "safest period in aviation history." There has not been a major crash since Nov. 12, 2001, when American Airlines Flight 587 plunged into a residential neighborhood in the Queens borough of New York City, killing 265 people, including five on the ground.
On Jan. 8, 2003, an Air Midwest commuter plane crashed on takeoff at Charlotte/Douglas International Airport, killing all 21 aboard.
Last December, a seaplane operated by Chalk's Ocean Airways crashed off Miami Beach, Florida, when its right wing separated from the fuselage shortly after takeoff, killing the 18 passengers and two crew members. That plane, a Grumman G-73 Turbo Mallard, was built in 1947 and modified significantly in 1979.
How long before someone mentions terrorism?
It doesn't look like it will be mentioned except to say it wasn't. They still aren't sure what happened in the plane, but it looks like a complete failure on the parts of the engines and the electrical system.
I felt sick when I watched the story on the news this morning. These people basically were engulfed in flames and burned to death since the plane was found completely intact. It must have been horrible.
I live about forty minutes from that airport. I'm at work and was just told by a customer right before I saw this post. The survivor is one of the pilots, he thinks. I'm very sorry for the people, but beyond thankful that none of my family were on that plane.
EDIT #2:The cause has been determind (C&P'ed from comcast)
LEXINGTON, Ky. - A commuter jet mistakenly trying to take off on a runway that was too short crashed into a field Sunday and burst into flames, killing 49 people and leaving the lone survivor _ a co-pilot _ in critical condition, federal investigators said.
Preliminary flight data from Comair Flight 5191's black box recorders and the damage at the scene indicate the plane, a CRJ-100 regional jet, took off from the shortest runway at Lexington's Blue Grass Airport, National Transportation Safety Board member Debbie Hersman said.
The 3,500-foot-long strip, unlit and barely half the length of the airport's main runway, is not intended for commercial flights. The twin-engine CRJ-100 would have needed 5,000 feet to fully get off the ground, aviation experts said.
It wasn't immediately clear how the plane ended up on the shorter runway in the predawn darkness. There was a light rain Sunday, and the strip veers off at a V from the main runway, which had just been repaved last week.
"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 all that information off," Hersman said.
The Atlanta-bound plane plowed through a perimeter fence and crashed in a field less than mile from the end of that runway at about 6:07 a.m. 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 Oct. 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.
Comair President Don Bornhorst said maintenance for the plane that crashed Sunday was up to date and its three-member flight crew was experienced and had been flying that airplane for some time.
"We are absolutely, totally committed to doing everything humanly possible to determine the cause of this accident," Bornhorst said. "One of the most damaging things that can happen to an investigation of this magnitude is for speculation or for us to guess at what may be happening."
Most of the passengers aboard the flight had planned to connect to other flights in Atlanta and did not have family waiting for them, said the Rev. Harold Boyce, a volunteer chaplain at Atlanta's Hartsfield-Jackson airport.
One woman was there expecting her sister. The two had planned to fly together to catch an Alaskan cruise, Boyce said.
"Naturally, she was very sad," Boyce said. "She was handling it. She was in tears."
The only survivor of the crash was identified as first officer James M. Polehinke, who was in critical condition after surgery at the University of Kentucky hospital.
The other crew members were Capt. Jeffrey Clay, who was hired by Erlanger, Ky.-based Comair in 1999, and flight attendant Kelly Heyer, hired in 2004. Polehinke has been with Comair since 2002.
The plane had undergone routine maintenance as recently as Saturday and had 14,500 flight hours, "consistent with aircraft of that age," Bornhorst said.
Investigators from the FAA and NTSB were at the scene, and Bornhorst said the airline was working to contact relatives of the passengers.
White House spokeswoman Dana Perino said President Bush, who is spending a long weekend at his family's summer home on the Maine coast, was being briefed on the crash.
"The president was deeply saddened by the news of the plane crash in Kentucky today," she said. "His sympathies are with the many families of the victims of this tragedy."
Among those killed were a newlywed couple starting their honeymoon. Jon Hooker, a former minor-league baseball player, had just married Scarlett Parlsey the night before the crash in a fairy tale wedding ceremony complete with a horse-drawn carriage and 300 friends.
"It's so tragic because he was so happy last night," said Keith Madison, who coached Hooker's baseball team at the University of Kentucky and attended the wedding. "It's just an incredible turn of events. It's really painful."
The crash marks the end of what has been called the "safest period in aviation history" in the United States. There has not been a major crash since Nov. 12, 2001, when American Airlines Flight 587 plunged into a residential neighborhood in Queens, N.Y., killing 265 people, including five on the ground.
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Associated Press Writer Leslie Miller in Washington and Harry Weber in Atlanta contributed to this report.
I find it weird that the original news article has to clarify that the fire was hot. >.>
A Hot Fire doesn't mean temperature. It's a term for a fire that's being fueled actively, I believe. I need to check that.
But in this case it means the fuel in the plane was burning. That's hard to put out easily.
Geez, can you imagine what that must be like for that poor soul who survied? Honestly, as lucky as I would be to count myself alive after a crash like that, if I were on that plane, being the only surviver would be the last person I'd want to be...
Something tells me you'd think differently if you were on a plane that was going down =.
Let's put it this way: I'd rather die relatively quickly, than deal with the pain of surviving.
quote] Something tells me you'd think differently if you were on a plane that was going down =.
What the hell. Didn't we learn somethign from the Skynyrd crash and that incident where there were snakes on a plane?
Don't use planes. They're dangerous. Use landships.
What I find really sad is that there was a newly wed couple that were on their way to their honeymoon when the plane crashed. 
Yeah I heard about that also, its really sad when you think about it because they just got married and were prolly plannig alot for the future. Its really that though but I heard the accident could have been prevented because apparently there was some technical issues, thats what I heard on CNN.
