No cause pinpointed in crash NTSB reports further details, no conclusion
While pilots' chatter may have contributed to confusion that put Comair's Flight 5191 onto the wrong runway at Blue Grass Airport last summer, federal investigators Wednesday offered no definitive cause for the disaster that killed 49 people in Lexington.
The National Transportation Safety Board released hundreds of pages of documents from its investigation that yielded more details about the Aug. 27 crash, but no final answers.
Jim Hall, a former NTSB chairman, said he still can't understand why the board doesn't hold a hearing given all the remaining issues in the case.
"This accident deserved a public hearing with so many safety issues in this tragedy," he said.
John Goglia, a professor of aviation science at St. Louis University and a former NTSB member, said conversation between the pilots about other pilots' looking for jobs as they taxied away from the gate was careless.
"That's a real problem - it's called distraction, more than one accident has been caused by it," Goglia said.
While first officer James Polehinke appears to have violated Comair alcohol policy with a beer purchase within 12 hours before his flight, Goglia noted the pilot still would have been within rules set by the Federal Aviation Administration. He said it was a non-issue considering Polehinke's blood test detected no alcohol in his system.
Goglia also dismissed the significance of the air-traffic controller on duty, Christopher Damron, changing his account of the events that morning in a supplemental report.
Damron said in an initial handwritten statement made the date of the crash "I cleared him for takeoff ... and watched him take runway 22 (the assigned runway)."
In another statement made the same day "I did not watch Com191 take runway 22. I saw Com191's position on Taxiway a, heading for runway 22. I then cleared Com191 for takeoff. I saw Com191's lights turning toward Runway 22. I turned around to do the traffic count, heard a crash and saw a fireball west of the airport." Goglia said it wasn't uncommon for witnesses to remember other details.
Reports issued Wednesday by the NTSB's investigation teams showed that Comair didn't have procedures for a crew to verify it was on the proper assigned runway before takeoff.
In addition, other Comair crews interviewed in the wake of the crash expressed confusion about whether the Erlanger-based carrier's rules allow for nighttime takeoffs from unlit runways.
The Aug. 27 crash occurred about a half-hour before dawn. The fact that Runway 26 - the one the doomed jet used - had no lights was a sign that it was not meant for commercial jets.
Finally, the investigators found that Comair had a less than effective method for distributing the latest notices about airport conditions to its crews. The dispatches, called notices to airmen or NOTAMs, were not sent directly to crews in an automated way; they first had to go to a vendor.
A crucial notice, filed Aug. 20, alerted pilots that part of the taxiway to Runway 22 - the one the Comair jet should have taken - was closed. But the crew of Flight 5191 didn't get that notice, possibly adding to their confusion.
The one sign from the Comair pilots aboard doomed Flight 5191 that they knew they were in danger occurred less than 5 seconds before the cockpit voice recorder stopped.
Capt. Jeffrey Clay said "whoa" 1.2 seconds before the sound of an impact followed by undecipherable shouting, screaming or cursing, according to a transcript of the cockpit voice recorder that was released Wednesday.
The sound similar to an engine stall warning started and continued for the remaining second of the recording.
But pilots appeared to be conducting routine takeoff procedures as late as 1.8 seconds before the impact. Exactly 16.7 seconds before the impact, pilots acknowledged the lack of runway lights - a clue they were on the wrong runway - but didn't express alarm.
First officer James Polehinke, who was at the controls, said:
"Dat is weird with no lights."
Clay replied: "Yeah."
