Saturday, July 28, 2007
Jul. 28, 2007 (McClatchy-Tribune Regional News delivered by Newstex) --
While only time can lessen the pain of those who lost loved ones on Comair Flight 5191, travelers in and out of Lexington can take solace in knowing that Blue Grass Airport was not at fault.
A construction project at the time of the crash receives only passing mention in the National Transportation Safety Board's conclusions about the chain of cockpit errors that led a crew to take off from the wrong runway.
NTSB members and staff repeatedly referred to the airport's layout as simple and straightforward. More than 300 flights had taken off without incident in the week before the crash, 48 of them in the dark and two in the pre-dawn minutes before Flight 5191 taxied down a runway that was too short for the commuter jet to take off. Any confusion caused by repaving and repainting was obviously minimal and no explanation for what happened.
The NTSB also concluded that the emergency response was timely and well coordinated and that First Officer James Polehinke survived because of swift and skilled work by first responders.
The loss of life on Flight 5191 could make air travel safer for others if the Federal Aviation Administration follows recommendations from the NTSB.
The fate of 5191 has also drawn attention to understaffing of the nation's air traffic control towers and the risks posed by fatigue as controllers are required to work extra shifts.
The controller in Lexington was probably fatigued from having only two hours of sleep between shifts, though it's not clear that fatigue was a factor in his decision to perform a lower-priority administrative task as 5191 pulled out on the wrong runway.
The FAA was supposed to have two controllers in the tower that night and early morning, but there was only one. The second controller would have handled the administrative task, though there's no way to know if that would have changed the outcome. Controllers are not required to watch planes as they take off.
In the 11 months since the crash, six air traffic controllers have been hired in Lexington.
If the lessons from Flight 5191 make air travel safer for others, those 49 premature deaths will not have been in vain.
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