CRASH KILLS 49

'WE ARE FAMILIES AND FRIENDS OF THE VICTIMS'

By Amy Wilson - HERALD-LEADER STAFF WRITER

Comair 5191 never made it much beyond the moist green earth from which it had broken free.

An hour before sunrise in clearing weather, the airplane with 50 souls aboard ran out of runway. The Atlanta-bound plane lasted less than a minute aloft before falling a mile west of the airport, casting 50,000 pounds of debris and jet fuel about as it all burned mercilessly to a halt.

Forty-nine people on board were killed.

Immediately, the early-morning quiet enveloping Blue Grass Airport was no more.

Around 6:15 a.m., local hospitals were told to gather their staffs and to be ready for multiple trauma victims. Versailles Road became an emergency staging ground. Three police officers pulled a single man, the plane's first officer, barely alive, from the plane.

And the realization hit that Nick Bentley's farm had become both a crash site and sacred ground.

Sacred to us all, for the dead were familiar. Newlyweds, eager to start their honeymoon. Another couple on their way to be married. A well-known living saint. A University of Kentucky dean. A member of the family of Lexington's most prominent philanthropist.

As Lexington Mayor Teresa Isaac said, "We don't just sympathize with the families and friends of the victims; we are the families and friends of the victims."

Attention quickly focused on whether the plane had taken off from the wrong and disastrously shorter of the airport's two runways. The airport's 8-foot-tall fence was torn down just feet from the end of the pavement, the trees beyond it were sheared and a tumble of char rested in forest rubble short of the farm's outbuildings.

Later in the evening, National Transportation Safety Board member Debbie Hersman confirmed only that preliminary information obtained from on-board recorders and on-site inspection indicates that the Comair plane took off from Runway 26, the one described by airport officials as too short to accommodate the takeoff requirements of the midsized plane.

Of the two runways at Blue Grass Airport, the main is 7,001 feet with 600 feet of safety area on each end. The general aviation runway is 3,500 feet. The main runway was completely repaved last weekend. The only construction last week on the smaller runway was to tie it in to the main runway, according to airport officials.

The short runway, according to airport officials, is not used except in daylight hours and is not equipped with lights.

Worst air disaster here

Flight 5191 took off at 6:05 a.m., in the dark with the only eastern light obscured by rain clouds. The drizzle had passed. It was an unspectacular 75 degrees out. The airport was unbustled by the hour and the weekend schedule.

It was the worst commercial air disaster in Lexington, and it ends one of the safest periods in U.S. aviation history, a period that began after the Nov. 12, 2001, crash of a full American Airlines jet into a Queens, N.Y. neighborhood.

The Comair crash was not visible from any Lexington roadway, the dead still inside the plane, which was mostly intact on the ground. Only one ambulance left the scene, carrying the plane's only survivor, James Polehinke, the 44-year-old first officer, to the University of Kentucky Hospital. UK spokesman Jay Blanton confirmed that Polehinke was in surgery for much of the day. He was in critical condition last night.

Polehinke was pulled from the plane's wreckage by airport police officers Pete Maupin and John Sallee, and Lexington police officer Bryan Jared.

Pilot Jeffrey Clay, 35, of Burlington, perished along with the plane's sole flight attendant, Kelly Heyer, 28, of Cincinnati. They were immediately identified by Comair, which would not release the full passenger list until it was satisfied all family notification had taken place.

Still, Lexington hospitals were quickly told to expect no one else and to send their doctors home. Unaware of that, Sunday sermons in churches were changed so that whole congregations could send pleas to heaven for the safety and deliverance of the plane's passengers.