‘A story behind every person.’ D.C. plane crash triggers memories in Lexington | Opinion
The Jan. 29 middair collision of a passenger plane and an Army helicopter over the Potomac in Washington, D.C. ricocheted around the world with the sudden, horrendous loss of 67 people.
Here in Lexington, the news hit with even more force, and sent minds racing back to 2006 when 49 people from the Bluegrass region lost their lives in another air disaster.
Comair Flight 5191, a passenger jet on its way to Atlanta, took off on the wrong, too short runway and crashed before it could attain altitude.
Today, people still mourn at the distinctive memorial at the Arboretum of 49 birds soaring upward.
“When I heard the news, my mind went right away to living through that tragedy with those families,” said Lexington attorney David Royse, who represented the plaintiff group of families after the crash in their litigation against the airline.
“You know there will be a story behind every person on that plane,” he said. “Here in Kentucky, because that flight originated here, you couldn’t find someone not touched by that crash. I can only imagine the reverberations.”
The Washington crash was between American Airlines Flight 5342 flying out of Wichita, Kansas, and a military Black Hawk helicopter. The list of plane passengers is particularly heartbreaking, as it includes many young teenage figure skaters, many of them age 12 and 13, and their parents.
Also heartbreaking was the political finger-pointing the day after the flight, well before it was possible to know what had gone wrong. It now appears the helicopter was off its flight path, but we still don’t know all the causes.
“When you have something like this, a lot of people will use it as a platform,” Royse said. “What I always try to go back to, because I lived it, is there is a family who is going home knowing their loved one isn’t here anymore and how critically important that is to the rest of their lives. All that BS that gets bandied about in the public arena in the hours right after, doesn’t mean anything to anything.”
What means much, much more is what good can come out of such an air disaster. It’s been 19 years since Flight 5191, and 16 years since the Colgan Flight 3047 to Buffalo, New York, which plunged into a house, killing 49 passengers and crew and one person on the ground.
Royse and his co-counsel Peter Perlman believe that the long interval between these disasters is because of groups like the National Transportation Safety Board who investigate so closely, but also the work of families who are determined that other people shouldn’t have to live through the same tragedy.
On Aug. 27, 2009, three years to the day after Flight 5191, the families had settled with the airline. The lawyers discussed having a press conference, but as Perlman said recently “we didn’t think that was a good idea because it put the emphasis on the lawyers, not the families.”
Instead, the lawyers and families collaborated on a letter sent to the Federal Aviation Administration, the NTSB, Comair, its parent Delta, and the pilots and air controllers union that detailed exactly what went wrong and what needed to be fixed.
These included a runway verification plan, better identification of runways, between runway lighting, “sterile cockpits” in which idle conversation that can distract pilots is forbidden and rules about administrative work for air traffic controllers.
The letter ended by saying: “Unfortunately, the tragic events of Aug. 27, 2006 cannot be undone. We must bear the horrific burden of this tragedy for the remainder of our lives. But the United States aviation industry has an opportunity, in fact an affirmative duty, to learn the lessons from 5191 and promptly implement improvements to ensure such an avoidable tragedy does not occur again.”
In the end, the Federal Aviation Administration adopted several new policies, including better scheduling and training for air controllers, better markings and lighting on runways and specific directions from controllers to pilots when crossing runway intersections.
No doubt, the sames kinds of things will emerge as investigators look into what happened at Reagan National Airport last week, one of the nation’s busiest.
Royse and Perlman hope the families will once again be involved in recommendations.
“It’s so shocking, but I would say from our experience, it would be good if the families could stick together and work together and do whatever they could to be sure their experience will make a difference to others so it’s not repeated,” Perlman said.
The experience of creating change to make airlines safer was “immensely rewarding,” Royse said.
“But to this day, I have wrestled with the duality. I cried with those people, I watched the horrors they went through, but in a totally different way, I made some friends, and got to really accomplish something that was helpful to airline safety.
“I’m grateful for the good that came out of that cycle.”
This story was originally published February 5, 2025 at 5:00 AM.
