Mark Story: Plane scare emotional for Marshall coaches

In Gerad Parker's line of work, air travel is a must.

Nevertheless, the ex-University of Kentucky wide receiver is still weighing how he feels about stepping on an airplane again.

Along with another former UK football player, Mike Cassity, Parker was among the Marshall University assistant football coaches whose March 9 Comair flight from Atlanta to Charleston, W.Va., was diverted to Lexington for a potential emergency landing after the pilot could not get the plane's front landing gear to deploy.

"I usually look forward to any trip to Lexington," said Parker, who lettered at UK from 2001-04 and then worked as a graduate assistant for Rich Brooks. "This one, I could have done without."

Any connection with airplane trouble and Marshall football carries eerie connotations, of course. In 1970, a plane carrying the Thundering Herd team home to Huntington from a game at East Carolina crashed. All 75 people on board — coaches, players, athletics administrators and fans — died.

The crash and its emotionally wrenching aftermath became the subject of the 2006 Matthew McConaughey film We Are Marshall.

On March 9, Parker was among the Marshall assistants who had been visiting with coaches at Mississippi State. It was one of his first acts as a member of the Thundering Herd coaching staff. In fact, Marshall had yet to officially announce that it had hired Parker to coach its wide receivers off of the staff at Tennessee-Martin.

Other Herd aides had been to Fort Worth to meet with the brain trust at Texas Christian University.

As flight schedules worked out, all the Marshall assistants, though not head coach Doc Holliday, wound up meeting in Atlanta's Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport. They were all going to be on Comair Flight 5359 into Charleston.

Riding a shuttle in the Atlanta airport, Parker says a fellow passenger noted all the coaches decked out in Marshall green and cracked a dark joke: "'I can't believe they are letting you all fly on the same plane.'"

Says Parker: "Everybody laughed at the time. It didn't seem real funny a little while later."

Having no experience flying into Charleston, Parker says he was slow to recognize there was a problem. The new Marshall wide receivers coach was sitting in the back of the Comair regional jet with tight ends coach Phillip Ratliff. Both are former football standouts at Lawrence County High School.

"Phillip has flown into Charleston a lot and he could tell something wasn't right just because of how long we were in the air," Parker said.

Eventually, the pilot came on the intercom to explain that the crew had not been able to get the plane's front landing gear down and that the flight was being diverted to Blue Grass Airport because it had a longer runway.

The short trip from West Virginia to Kentucky saw the plane's passenger compartment fill with tension. "Nobody lost it or anything," Parker says of the 38 passengers. "But it was very solemn, very somber."

For the Marshall football coaches, the potentially tragic irony of their situation hung heavy in the air.

"How could you not think about (the prior Marshall football crash)," Parker said. "Absolutely, that was in our minds."

On the way to Lexington, Parker says the plane dropped low enough that it was possible for passengers to send text messages.

He texted his wife, the former West Carter High School and Morehead State basketball star Kandi Brown, the details of what was happening.

"She got two texts back through to me," Parker said. "The first one was, 'Oh, my God!' The second one was, 'Do you want me to come to Lexington?'"

Parker told his wife yes, and texted her the flight number. He then lost cell phone reception.

As Flight 5359 descended into Lexington, Parker said the fire trucks and emergency vehicles assembled for a possible crash landing were visible from above.

"You start thinking about your life, what you've gotten done, what you want to get done," Parker said. "In my case, I've got a great wife and a family that has loved me. The other guys, a lot of them have kids. You can only imagine what they were thinking."

As the plane began its final run toward landing, Parker says silence held sway on board. Which is when the pilot came on the intercom with, at last, good news.

"He said that according to the lights and gauges, they believed that the front landing gear had deployed," Parker said.

Which was proven true when the plane landed without incident.

Afterward, Parker said a couple of his fellow Marshall assistants talked about flying back to West Virginia.

The ex-UK receiver was among the larger group of Herd aides who "said there's no way I'm getting back on a plane," Parker said.

They rented cars. Parker made it as far as Winchester with his colleagues. There, he met his wife — who had been making a frantic rush to Lexington — and rode the rest of the way home with her.

Marshall will have spring practice, then its spring football game, and then an NCAA recruiting window will open and the Herd assistant football coaches will have to hit the road.

For a school that recruits up and down the East Coast and throughout the South, that will mean air travel.

Gerad Parker has been thinking about that.

"At the end of the day, it really doesn't matter how I feel about getting back on a plane," he says. "I have to."

This story was originally published March 20, 2011 at 12:00 AM with the headline "Mark Story: Plane scare emotional for Marshall coaches."