Quiet Comair’s Had a Busy Few Years

Over its first 20 years in operation, Comair, a Cincinnati-based regional airline that linked passengers to their flights aboard Delta Air Lines, rarely rated a notice.

The airline, which got its start in 1977 flying six passenger planes to Cincinnati, Cleveland, Detroit and Akron, has more than made up for that in the last few years.

Striking pilots shut the carrier down for three months in 2001, a Christmas computer glitch in 2004 stranded travelers nationwide, and the company has experienced a revolving door in its presidential offices.

On Sunday, the airline and the National Transportation Safety Board were attempting to sort out the details of the latest incident -- the crash in Lexington, Ky.

Comair is a wholly owned subsidiary of Delta, which acquired the airline in 2000 when it formed Delta Connection.

Delta filed for federal bankruptcy protection last year and is attempting to negotiate salary cuts with Delta and Comair employees.

The regional airline offers more than 800 daily departures to 95 cities, flying from Canada to the Bahamas and the East Coast to the Rocky Mountains. It provides service between Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport and the Delta/Comair hub in Cincinnati.

“Comair is very well run,” said Aaron Gellman, former director of the Northwestern University Transportation Center.

Comair was the nation’s first regional airline to introduce jet service in 1993, and it became the first to offer all-jet service in 2002.

Its fleet, which is among the newest in the airline industry, includes 168 regional jets, some with 40 seats, some with 50 seats and some with 70.

It was shut down for three months in 2001 by striking pilots.

In 2004, the airline’s computers that tracked crew work hours crashed when it was unable to process hundreds of flight cancellations and delays caused by a storm just before Christmas. The carrier was forced to cancel all of its 1,100 flights on Christmas Day and most of its flights the following day.

Don Bornhorst, the airline’s third president since that computer meltdown, was appointed to the job three months ago.

Sunday’s crash is the third Comair accident in which passengers were killed, according to the NTSB and Federal Aviation Administration. Twenty-nine people were killed in 1997 when a Comair turbo-prop plane encountered icing conditions and crashed attempting to land in Detroit. Eight people were killed in a 1979 crash in Cincinnati.