LEXINGTON, Kentucky (AP):
A commuter jet crashed during take-off early yesterday and burst into flames, killing 49 people and leaving the lone survivor - a co-pilot - in critical condition. Investigators confirmed that the plane had turned on to the wrong runway and ran out of pavement.
Atlanta-bound Comair flight 5191 crashed in the pre-dawn darkness at 6:07 a.m. in a field less than a mile from the shorter of Blue Grass Airport's two runways.
Runway length
The main runway is 7,000 feet (2,100 metres) long, but the shorter one is just 3,500 feet (1.050 metres) and unlit, designed mostly for small, private planes. Aviation experts said the twin-engine CRJ-200 regional jet would have needed 4,500 feet (1,350 metres) to fully get off the ground.
Neither the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) nor Comair, a subsidiary of Delta Air Lines Inc., would speculate on the cause of the crash or say which runway the plane was on. But aerial images of the crash site in the rolling hills of Kentucky's horse country showed trees damaged at the end of the shorter runway and the nose of the crashed plane almost parallel to the smaller strip.
The plane was largely intact but in flames when rescuers reached it. A police officer burned his arms dragging the only survivor from the cracked cockpit, but the fire kept rescuers from reaching anyone else.
"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."
The crash was the United States' worst domestic airplane accident in nearly five years.
Terrorism ruled out
FAA spokeswoman Laura Brown said the agency had no indication that terrorism was involved in any way. Both flight recorders, which should help investigators determine what went wrong, were sent to Washington, D.C., for analysis.
The location of the wreckage makes it almost inconceivable that the airplane could have taken off on the longer runway, said Saint Louis University aerospace professor emeritus, Paul Czysz.
"Sometimes with the intersecting runways, pilots go down the wrong one," Czysz said. "It doesn't happen very often."
