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, with less lighting and barely half the length of the airport’s main runway, is not intended for use by jets. The twin-engine CRJ-100 would have needed 5,000 feet to get fully 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.
“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 the runway at 6:07 a.m. Aerial images of the crash site 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 – among them, 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.
“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 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.
Comair President Don Bornhorst said the plane had undergone routine maintenance as recently as Saturday and had 14,500 flight hours, “consistent with aircraft of that age.” Its three-member flight crew was experienced and had been flying that airplane for some time, he said.
“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.”
The only survivor was identified as first officer James M. Polehinke, 44, who was in critical condition after surgery at the University of Kentucky hospital.
“He’s very lucky,” said Dr. Andrew C. Bernard, a trauma surgeon.
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.
All 49 bodies had been recovered from the wreckage, said Stacy Floden, spokeswoman for the state Justice and Public Safety Cabinet. No positive identifications had been made, and preliminary autopsies had been done on 16 or 17 bodies, she said.
Investigators from the FAA and NTSB were at the scene, and Bornhorst said the airline was working to contact relatives of the passengers.
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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