Who crashed the Comair jet at Lexington's Blue Grass Airport, killing 49 of the 50 people aboard? How could a commercial jet take off from a runway that was meant for small planes and was clearly too short for big planes? Who was really responsible for the fiasco that became an instant disaster?
Well, the blame game has certainly started. So take your pick among the following culprits:
It was the guys who repaved the runways.
It was the people who put up the unfamiliar barriers.
It was the airport officials who approved a differing taxi layout.
It was the officials who changed the taxiing route to the proper runway.
It was the controller who must have been asleep at the switch.
It must have been the FAA who provided for only one controller in the tower.
It must have been the pilots who were accelerating as they ran off the end of the runway.
It must have been the architects who failed to provide runway signs of sufficient size to be seen in pre-dawn light conditions.
It must have been the airline which was too cheap to equip its planes with new global positioning technology which tells a pilot which runway he is approaching.
Who was responsible for the fiasco of Comair Flight 5191? To paraphrase Jim Carville, it was the pilots, stupid.
There are three reasons to blame the pilots.
The plane functioned perfectly, according to the black box and witnesses. This means the fault was human error.
According to Federal law, pilots are responsible for the safe operation of their planes. Not the airport, not the sign painters, not the controllers. The pilots are responsible.
The pilots clearly did not use a specific, available tool which would have warned them that they were on the wrong runway before takeoff. They ignored a tool that had been invented and used by travelers and explorers sixteen centuries before the Wright Brothers were even born -- the compass.
The jet took off on the wrong runway, crashed and burned all because the pilots were too lazy to line up their compass heading with the direction of the runway. They ignored a simple procedure that every Boy Scout can execute. Every sailor and every soldier is taught how to read a map using a compass. Beginner pilots are instructed to line up the runways with their compass heading. Yet these highly trained, veteran pilots ignored their compass roared off into poor visibility on the wrong runway.
This was no accident. It was pure neglect. If this crash becomes an episode of Law and Order, the writers will make the pilot survive and the prosecutors will charge him with "murder by depraved indifference."
The study of what caused the Comair disaster will go on for two or three years if the slow-moving FAA's history is any guide. But they could save us all a lot of time and expense by reporting now.
Nobody but the pilots could have created this tragic fiasco.
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