Commuter Jet Crash in Kentucky Kills 49

In the worst domestic aviation disaster in nearly five years, a commuter jet taking off Sunday from the Blue Grass Airport crashed in the predawn darkness and burst into flames, killing all but one of the 50 passengers and crew.

The cause of the crash of Comair Flight 5191 was not immediately known, but officials were focusing Sunday night on why the jet took off from a short runway that is not used by commercial airliners. Investigators from the National Transportation Safety Board and the Federal Aviation Administration were on the scene to open an inquiry within hours.

All 47 passengers and two of the three crew members died in a wooded area of idyllic Kentucky farmland, about half a mile off the runway. The 50-seat plane had been bound for Atlanta.

The lone survivor, first officer James M. Polehinke, was taken to the University of Kentucky Chandler Medical Center, where he was listed in critical condition.

A policeman who reached the burning wreckage within minutes of the crash burned his arms as he pulled the first officer from the broken cockpit, the Associated Press reported. He couldn’t get to anyone else.

It was “out of a miracle” that Polehinke withstood the intense blaze fed by full fuel tanks, said Fayette County Coroner Gary Ginn.

By 7 p.m., workers had recovered 33 of the bodies, most of which were intact inside the charred fuselage. They planned to stop the recovery at nightfall and resume at 8 a.m.

Among the dead were honeymoon-bound Jon Hooker and Scarlett Parsley Hooker, who wed Saturday. He was a former University of Kentucky baseball player and former pitcher for the Fargo-Moorhead RedHawks in North Dakota, a minor league team, according to the university. She was a graduate student at the university’s College of Health Sciences.

“Jon was one of the good guys,” RedHawks General Manager Josh Buchholz said in a statement.

Also on board was Pat Smith of Kentucky, a member of Habitat for Humanity’s international board of directors. He was flying to Gulfport, Miss., to build homes on the storm-wrecked Gulf Coast, according to Duane Bates, a Habitat spokesman.

Larry Turner, an associate dean at the University of Kentucky who ran the school’s extension program, was also aboard the flight. He grew up on a farm in Rising Sun, Ind., and had been affiliated with the extension program since 1978, the school said in a statement.

“Today, we have lost one of our best partners,” university President Lee T. Todd Jr. said.

The jet was cleared for takeoff at 6:05 a.m., with a scheduled departure at 6:10 a.m. The weather was clear.

Residents near the Blue Grass Airport said their windows shook and they heard what sounded like a “clap of thunder.” One man told CNN he saw “a flash of light over the hillside” followed by “a big plume of smoke.”

The plane appears to have grazed the perimeter fence, then smashed into a 30-foot-high stand of trees, said Nick Bentley, a 60-year-old real estate investor and racehorse breeder who owns 115 acres of fallow farmland on the other side of the fence.

“He just clipped it,” Bentley said. “He didn’t miss by much.”

The plane’s tail, engine and fuselage broke apart during the wreck, and debris scattered several hundred feet from the runway, officials said. Two bodies were ejected.

At a news conference, Comair President Don Bornhorst said, “We are absolutely totally committed to do anything humanly possible to determine the cause of this accident.” In the meantime, he said, “we cannot speculate on the cause.”

Comair is a regional carrier operated by Delta Air Lines Inc. The CRJ-100 jet was manufactured by Bombardier Regional Aircraft of Toronto.

Both the flight data recorder and the cockpit voice recorder were recovered and sent to the National Transportation Safety Board in Washington, and analysis had begun Sunday afternoon.

Officials said the plane took off from a 3,500-foot general aviation runway that is half the width and less than half the length of the lighted and recently repaved 7,000-foot runway used for commercial flights.

NTSB member Debbie Hersman said “ground scars” -- indentations on the land -- were leading investigators to that conclusion. “The evidence that we have from the scene,” she said, “indicate that this airplane lined up and took off from Runway 26,” the smaller of the two.

The shorter runway may not have provided enough room for takeoff. According to Bombardier, the plane requires a runway of more than 5,000 feet when carrying a full load. Spokesman Bert Cruickshank said required runway lengths varied based on a host of factors, including plane weight, outdoor temperature and other weather conditions. Crews calculate the needs of each flight before takeoff.

A former NTSB official said investigators would try to determine if perhaps the tower had given the pilot wrong directions, the pilot had become disoriented and made a wrong turn, or the signage had not been properly restored after the runway renovation.

The airport had been closed a week earlier to repave the commercial runway, the final stage of a nearly three-year improvement project that added safety buffer space at each end of the larger runway. An airport official said the signage did not change during the construction.

Los Angeles aviation safety consultant Barry Schiff said it was almost unheard-of for a pilot to taxi down the wrong runway. Charts and signs tell the crew where they are, and a pilot would know from experience whether a runway was long enough for the plane. Even if the control tower directed the plane to an inappropriate runway, he said, one of the crew members should have noticed and radioed back.

“You had two crew members in the cockpit, both of whom had to believe they were taking off on the correct runway, which is really kind of strange,” said Schiff, a captain for 34 years with TWA. “That’s not the kind of mistake you’d expect a professional airline crew to make.”

The FAA’s Brown and a Transportation Security Administration spokeswoman each said the crash did not appear to have been terrorism-related. “We don’t have any information that the crash was security-related,” said TSA spokeswoman Ann Davis.

For investigators, one of the major issues beyond the cause of the crash will be “survival factors,” said Peter Goelz, a former managing director of the NTSB: “Why was it that in this accident 49 of the 50 people died? Did they die on impact? Did they die because of smoke and fire? Did they attempt to exit the aircraft and couldn’t get out? Was there anything that could have been done to increase the survivability in this tragedy?”

Firefighters arrived at the scene within eight minutes, officials said, and began hosing down the burning plane.

Bornhorst repeatedly referred to the accident’s toll on Comair as well as on the friends and families of those killed. “I cannot tell you the emotional devastation this brings upon an airline,” he said in one of his two nationally televised news conferences.

Bornhorst said Comair had purchased the jet new in January 2001. It underwent routine maintenance as recently as Saturday, he said, and had “a clean maintenance record.”

The aircraft had logged 14,500 hours in the air in 12,000 landing and takeoff cycles.

Pilot Jeffrey Clay, 35, joined Comair in November 1999, was promoted to captain in 2004 and was “very familiar” with the aircraft, Bornhorst said. Polehinke, 44, had been with Comair since March 2002, and flight attendant Kelly Heyer, 27, had been with Comair since July 2004.

Bornhorst would not say whether the crew had experience flying into and out of the Blue Grass Airport. The first officer and flight attendant had been based out of New York, the pilot out of Cincinnati/Northern Kentucky International Airport, according to the airline.

Bornhorst did say that the crew was well rested and had spent the night in Lexington in preparation for the early-morning takeoff.

Nine members of the NTSB team, which will lead the investigation, arrived in Lexington at noon Sunday. More investigators were to arrive by the end of the day.

NTSB investigators are to spend the next three to seven days in Lexington collecting information before the investigation moves back to Washington, spokesman Ted Lopatkiewicz said.

The accident was the country’s worst domestic airplane crash in nearly five years. It ended what some have called the safest period in U.S. aviation history. “I don’t think anybody would argue with that” characterization, Lopatkiewicz said.

The last major crash in the United States was in November 2001, when an American Airlines Airbus A300 plunged into a residential neighborhood near New York’s John F. Kennedy Airport, killing 265 people. The most recent fatal crash of a 50-seat Bombardier airliner occurred in November 2004 in Baotou, China, killing 55 people.

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Fausset reported from Lexington, Miller from Washington. Times staff writers Evelyn Larrubia and Stuart Silverstein in Los Angeles contributed to this report.