This is terrible. I hadn't even had the news on this morning. My mom called to tell me. Lexington is a little over an hour from each of us. No word yet on what happened.
Sems so much worse when it happens near home than somewhere across the world, don't know why that should be so. Maybe because I've flown out of that airport before?
It is somehow more personal. When the Chalk charter plane crashed off the coast of Lauderdale it was really scary because we had flown in that plane the year before to Bimini. It was a cramped uncomfortable sea plane and I did wonder how we would get out if there was trouble.
This is close to home for us too, and I agree it's definitely more personal. I have flown Comair many, many times back and forth from Knoxville to Cincinnati. That makes it more personal too.
So sad to think about those people headed off on their trips on a Sunday morning...
We fly Comair a lot because Delta uses them from Albuquerque to Salt Lake City. We were supposed to be on a Comair flight yesterday from Cincinnati to Toronto, but had to cancel the trip. Those small planes always make me nervous - but I had recently got used to them and decided not to be such a wimp about it (will have to rethink that).
A real tragedy- yes, the crew had to be inexperienced with the airport. Apparently they mistook a 75' wide 3500' runway (Runway 26) for the 150' wide, 7000'+ long active runway (Runway 22).
There is really no excuse if that did happen. Especially with a controller on duty in the control tower at the time.
Posts: 223 | Location: Birmingham,Alabama | Registered: 27 February 2005
I too want to know where the ground controller was? Perhaps this airport did not have one on duty at this hour?
I know close to home, I took my final flight exam for my private pilot's license and the day after another student was killed in a crash in the same plane I had just flown.
I agree, Dana. You can't help but wonder if they would have changed the opening act if it had been a larger plane disaster, or if it had happened "closer to home." Insensitive, and not entertaining. They should get a lot of mail on this one.
From what I've read, there was one controller on duty. Once he told the pilot which runway to use and got a "Roger," he wouldn't necessarily have been looking at the runways; he might have been looking over the plans for the next flight to clear.
Speaking as a former air traffic controller who has pulled many midnight shifts alone, these type of accidents are the nearly always the result of a failure of a number of indicators and safeguards.
The airport where this accident took place had recent construction that made a new taxi route necessary. That means that more than likely the new route was not published on an airport diagram. If this is the case then the pilots were missing a visual que to confirm the controller's taxi instructions. This assumes they did not see the taxiway signs because of the weather. The biggest missed visual que was the two compasses in the cockpit. They will tell you the runway you are on.
Runways are numbered by dropping the zero of the degree reading from a compass rose that the runway points to. In this case the longer runway was number 22 (pointing 220 degrees) and the shorter runway was 26 (260 degrees). When they pulled onto the runway their compass read 260 degrees and not 220 degrees as they( each pilot has a compass) should have if the plane was rolling on the correct runway. There are some technical things (magnetic deviation) that the pilots could have incorrectly entered that would have given an incorrect reading, but these are rare occurences. They could have been partying the night before and not observed the "8 hours between the throttle and bottle" rule. I saw this happen many many times during my career.
Now what could have failed in the control tower. Air traffic controllers are taught to observe an airplane to ensure that the pilot follows the instructions issued. Maybe the weather prevented the atc from doing that, or maybe he was distracted by other duties, or fatigue, or the success of a thousand previous clearances lulled him into a false sense of security and he relied on a command such "report starting your takeoff roll" and was too tired to stand up and confirm the airplane was on the correct runway.
Why would he be sitting down. Well someone has to use the radar scopes in the tower to man arrival and departure control. Someone needs to take handwritten requests for clearances from airplanes that found the weather a bit much for flying visually. Where I worked one controller on midnight shift handled ground control, tower control, radar arrival control, departure control, flight data control, and a 70 x 90 mile non-radar control area (the hardest position in atc). The two near misses that I had in my career were on midnight shift.
All of the above is speculation based on experience. My opinion, if you will. It is also my opinion that the safeguards failed both in the tower and in the airplane.
Posts: 158 | Location: West Virginia | Registered: 25 October 2005
Thank you for a concise and clearly worded explanation of what might have happened in this situation. There was a man from Naples on that plane that played golf with my husband. My heart goes out to all the family.
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