Posted on 08/27/2006 4:38:10 AM PDT by BigBlueJon
Edited on 08/27/2006 5:02:21 AM PDT by Admin Moderator. [history]
Possible plane crash in Lexington, KY. My brother works security for Lexington UK Hospital and was just called in. No news locally or on major news outlets yet. I didn't want to post anything for fear of being wrong, but he's still waiting for an official call while on stand-by.
Update from WTVQ 36 Lexington:
A plane has crashed near the Blue Grass Airport this morning. No word on details at this time. We are told it was a commercial aircraft. Versailles Road is blocked as emergency vehicles circle around the site. We have live coverage beginning at 7:20am. Stay with Action News 36 for more details.
Why even have the presser if there is nothing they will give?
I just came from a charity race at the kentucky speedway in which comair was one of the participating companies. They pulled a car and repainted the sides of the car left to say "our hearts and prayers go out to you." The atmosphere was very somber but they ended up winning and i know that made the members feel a little better, that they could provide a small token of positive during a day that has been all too negative for them.
"Debris field is several hundred feet extending from runway." "Lined up and took off from 26." "It did go through the perimeter fence." "Scar marks are consistent with the aircraft impacting the ground."
I know - they tear at me too. I just can't imagine any of it. (and your son will be fine, he's got you praying for him :)
NTSB pretty much said all that needs to be said. All comms between aircrew and ATC referenced runway 22, and the aircraft departed runway 26. Aircrew error, ATC inattention may or may not be considered contributory.
Yes, but it's a turbo prop, which means that it's not much different than flying a high by-pass turbofan, and virtually no different than flying a turboprop regional airliner. Except that the P-3 is larger than most or all of those.
Thrust reversers vs. reverse pitch on the props. And the P-3 is a many motor. Yes, other than the F-16 so are most jets, but they have the engines close together, rather than well separated. A matter of degree of course, the CRJ's engines appear to be about as far apart as an F-14s.
Overall though flying a P-3 would be closer to flying an airliner than flying a fighter, the P-3 being derived from the Electra airliner. Pilots are likely to have *much* more time at low altitude, with all that implies.
I suspect the story from the P-3 driver got garbled going through a relatively uniformed intermediary.
Anyone know if there's any kind of GPS software, or some kind of beacon signal that would've alerted the crew to the fact that they were on the wrong runway?
CNn breaking news email:
-- Flight 5191 took off from a short runway not typically used by commercial jets before it crashed, killing 49, an NTSB spokeswoman said.
If you're are talking about the primary surveillance system, ModeC, Mode1, Mode2 etc, it isn't accurate enough for ground control. Also unless the radar is right at the airport, you might not even be able to "see" an aircraft until it climbed out a bit. I would think they would have such a radar at the airport, but they might not if there is another larger airport pretty nearby.
The airport I fly out of on American Eagle has such a radar. I can see it out the window of my workplace. It's well elevated on a hill about a 1/2-3/4 mile off the north end of the runway.
Not necessary. Visual guidance, with confirmation from the aircraft's heading indicators, should be sufficient.
FWIW, I googled the phrase "wrong runway". I came up with enough hits to indicate that it might not be a bad idea. And I'm not including the hits relating to today's crash.
Confirming the aircraft was on the wrong runway is a big "give". So is the information about the ground scars and the perimeter fence being hit. She also said there was confirmation that only 22 was mentioned in the radio exchanges.
Sounds like, as PukinDog said, "the pilot goofed". Of course the guy in the tower goofed too, since he/she should have noted the pilot was on the wrong runway.
Remember that they are the government agency responsible for finding facts, not annonymous witnesses stating opinions. They cannot state things that they have not concluded through their own methods.
The only obstacle I would see P-3 guys having getting a commercial job would be less PIC time with three pilots on every flight.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20060827/ap_on_re_us/kentucky_crash;_ylt=Am3tXUWonHDTTFxfRj9fpMes0NUE;_ylu=X3oDMTA2Z2szazkxBHNlYwN0bQ--
Comair plane took off from wrong runway
By JEFFREY McMURRAY, Associated Press Writer 2 minutes ago
LEXINGTON, Ky. - Comair Flight 5191 was on a runway too short for its size and weight in the seconds before it crashed before dawn Sunday and burst into flames, killing 49 people and leaving the lone survivor — a co-pilot — in critical condition, federal investigators said.
Preliminary flight data from the plane's black boxes and the damage at the scene indicate the plane took off from Blue Grass Airport's shortest runway,
member Debbie Hersman said.
The 3,500-foot-long strip, unlit and barely half the length of the airport's main runway, is not intended for commercial flights.
It wasn't immediatly clear how the plane ended up on that runway.
"We will be looking into performance data, we will be looking at the weight of the aircraft, we will be looking at speeds, we will pull all that information off," Hersmann said.
Aviation experts said the twin-engine CRJ-200 regional jet would have needed 4,500 feet to fully get off the ground.
The Atlanta-bound plane crashed through a perimeter fence and crashed in a field less than mile from the end of that runway at about 6:07 a.m. Aerial images of the crash site in the rolling hills of Kentucky's horse country showed trees damaged at the end of the short runway and the nose of the plane almost parallel to the small strip.
When rescuers reached it, the plane was largely intact but in flames. A police officer burned his arms dragging the only survivor from the cracked cockpit.
The flames kept rescuers from reaching anyone else aboard — a newlywed couple starting their honeymoon, a Florida man who had caught an early flight home to be with his children and a University of Kentucky official among them.
"They were taking off, so I'm sure they had a lot of fuel on board," Fayette County Coroner Gary Ginn said. "Most of the injuries are going to be due to fire-related deaths."
FAA spokeswoman Laura Brown said the agency had no indication that terrorism was involved in any way in what was the country's worst domestic plane crash in five years.
It's rare for a plane to get on the wrong runway, but "sometimes with the intersecting runways, pilots go down the wrong one," said Saint Louis University aerospace professor emeritus Paul Czysz.
The worst such crash came on Oct. 31, 2000, when a Los Angeles-bound Singapore Airlines jumbo jet mistakenly went down a runway at Taiwan's Chiang Kai-Shek International Airport that had been closed for repairs because of a recent typhoon. The resulting collision with construction equipment killed 83 people on board.
It could be done, but I doubt it has been. I would think they'd have relative GPS, with a ground based reference GPS unit sending corrections to sets nearby. That would get you enough accuracy to be able to tell, reliably, which runway you were on, if you also had a digital map of the runways, in GPS coordinates. Still I doubt anyone has written any software, which would also have to know which runway you are supposed to be on, to provide an alarm.
But then P-3 missions are longer than fighter missions are they not? A lot longer. Most of it at low altitude too.
It wouldn't have to be anything fancy, would it? Maybe each runway could have some kind of beacon set to respond back with a ping IDing which runway the plane was sitting on? Or maybe something keyed to flash the number of the runway when a plane is sitting at the end of it waiting to take off, before the plane begins to move. Someplace a pilot could see out the cockpit window, even in the dark and/or in inclement weather.
I guess the boxes will tell, but this seems more like an air traffic control mistake or maybe confusion between the pilot and them
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