Surviving pilot had clean flying record
James Polehinke had a clean record as a pilot, with no accidents or mistakes, but he made a fatal error as he taxied Comair Flight 5191 down the runway: He made a wrong turn and tried to take off from a runway that was too short.
The crash killed 49 people ? everyone on board except the 44-year-old Polehinke, who was in critical condition Tuesday.
Polehinke?s mother, Honey Jackson, said her son is not to blame for the crash, and she asked people to be patient until all the facts were revealed.
?He could die at any moment,? said Jackson, a lounge singer who lives in Miami, Fla.
Jackson?s boyfriend and business manager, Antonio Cruz, said Polehinke was on life support, with punctured lungs and a broken pelvis. He was scheduled to have the first of many surgeries Tuesday, Cruz said.
?Nobody can say for sure yet if he?ll be able to recover,? Cruz said.
Polehinke was pulled from the burning plane after the crash, but he has not been able to tell investigators why he was on the wrong runway.
All recorded conversations between the cockpit and control tower indicate the pilots had planned to use the longer runway, investigators said. Somehow, they instead turned onto the short runway and took off ? noticing the lack of lights but apparently not realizing they were on the wrong runway until it was too late.
The plane hit a fence and trees and crashed in a nearby field. The flight captain, Jeffrey Clay, 35, was killed along with another crew member and 47 passengers.
A light rain was falling Sunday, and it was still dark around 6 a.m. when the plane crashed, and it was unclear whether the Comair pilots had been to the airport since the changes to the taxi route. But Polehinke had experience taking off and landing in small airports.
Polehinke spent five years, from 1997 to 2002, flying short-range, twin-engine planes for Florida-based Gulfstream International Airlines. He flew at small airports all over Florida and the Bahamas, starting as a first officer and getting promoted to captain in 2000.
Gulfstream director of operations Tom Herfort was a pilot for the company at the same time Polehinke was flying, and he said there were no problems with Polehinke.
?You know who?s got the good reputation and who doesn?t. I didn?t hear anything bad about the guy,? Herfort said. ?As far as I know he was a good captain for us.?
Polehinke had a full-time schedule, which typically means flying 85 to 90 hours a month, Herfort said. His flight schedule with the 19-seat planes routinely took him to the Bahamas, where most airports have no air traffic control towers, Herfort said.
?You have to really be on top of your game,? Herfort said. ?You?ve got to know how your aircraft performs. You?ve got to be able to judge weather.?
The shorter runway at Blue Grass Airport is for daylight operation only, and its lights haven?t worked since October 2001. NTSB officials said the cockpit voice recorder showed the pilots were talking about the absence of lights on the runway, but they didn?t report it to the control tower.
Reporters were allowed to see the crash site Tuesday, which still smelled strongly of jet fuel and had been cordoned off with yellow police tape. Grass and trees surrounding remains of the airplane had been charred by the crash.
Nothing inside the cockpit was distinguishable, just a twisted mass of wires and wreckage. Parts of the engine were found several yards away, and a large piece of the plane?s tail had smashed into a downed tree 50 yards away.
The crash was the deadliest in the U.S. since Nov. 12, 2001, when American Airlines Flight 587 plunged into a residential neighborhood in New York City, killing 265 people, including five on the ground.