Comair Crash: Still In The Dark
On Aug. 27, a Comair flight took off in the dark from a runway too short for a passenger jet. CBS News correspondent Bob Orr has more about the transcript of the cockpit recording released today.
But, five months after Comair flight 5191 crashed in a fireball in Lexington, Kentucky, we still don't know WHY the pilots made a fatal and inexplicable mistake.
The newly released transcript of the pilots' final cockpit conversation doesn't help much. It reveals two experienced airmen doing what pilots do — running checklists, making last minute safety checks and a little small talk while waiting for their turn to fly.
The airline says, in the moments leading up to the crash, there was too much non-pertinent cockpit chatter suggesting that might have distracted the pilots. But, their communications with the air traffic controller were business-like and, for the most part, focused. The Comair crew accurately "read-back" instructions to depart on runway 22, a seven thousand foot lighted strip regularly used by passenger planes. And the pilots properly programmed their jet's autopilot and their cockpit instruments for the correct course.
But, for some reason, they turned off the taxiway too early and lined up on a short, unlighted runway usually reserved for smaller private planes.
It's clear from the transcript that the pilots had no idea they were heading for disaster. Neither questioned the absence of runway lights before the plane started to roll. Neither apparently checked the plane's instrument heading which would have unmistakably told them they were 40 degrees off course. And neither one seemed to notice that their aircraft crossed over the correct lighted runway as it began racing toward destruction.
Seventeen seconds before the jet slammed into a fence the co-pilot finally seemed to suspect that something was wrong on their dark runway. He said to the captain, "dat is weird with no lights." The captain responded, "Yeah." But then the jet accelerated to one hundred miles an hour, before the captain uttered the final word from the cockpit, "Whoa."
Neither pilot ever said anything about trying to stop, and in fairness, there may not have been time. Forty-nine people of the 50 on board were killed by the impact and fire. Only one person survived, the co-pilot who was flying the plane at the time of the crash. But, he's never been interviewed by crash investigators and his family says he remembers nothing about that awful Sunday morning in Lexington.
So, sadly the biggest question in the crash remains unanswered.