Comair Flight 5191 Accident – Brief Overview, Crew Role, Administration Personnel, And Lessons Learned

Brief overview of the incident

Discuss about the Article for Comair Flight 5191 accident on Aug 27, 2006.

Brief overview of the incident

The Comair operated Comair Flight 5191 that was marketed as the Delta connection Flight 5191, was essentially scheduled as a US domestic passenger flight from the Lexington, Kentucky, to Atlanta Georgia, on behalf of the Delta connection. On the morning of 27 August 2006 at around 6:35, Eastern Time the flight crashed while it was attempting to take off from the Blue Grass Airport in Kentucky four miles west of the central business district of city of the Lexington. The plane was assigned the airport runway 22 for the takeoff, but used the runway 26 instead (Kulesa, 2003).  The runway 26 was very short for a safe takeoff, causing the plane to overrun the end of the runway before it became airborne.

Figure 1:  The approximate paths at the Blue grass airport, the blue runway shows the desired path runway 22 and the red runway shows the actual path runway 26, the ending at approximate crash site. The x part show the closed taxiway.

The craft crashed just past the end of the runway, killing forty-seven passengers and 2 of the three crew members (data Jan-Dec, 2005). The only survivor was the flight first officer. At the time, not the pilot was command, this is according to the cockpit voice recorder transcript, and the first officer was the pilot who was flying at the time of the accident. According to the NTSB report in regards to the crash, the investigator concluded the likely cause of the accident was the error of the pilot. Moreover, the flight crew failed to use on the available cues and the aids in identifying on the aircraft location on the airport surface during the taxi and the failure to cross check and verify the plane was on the right runway before the takeoff (Recommendation, 2006). The report, will certainly talk about a short description of the accident, the responsibility of the workers, the part of the administration staff, flight crew, air traffic controllers, other pilots, maintenance, weather conditions at the time off the accident. Furthermore, the report will explore on the lessons learnt as well as the steps leased out or even applied to stop the same incident as well as some element, which are appealing for a comprehensive examination on the matter. (Brown & Whitehurst, 2012)

Role of the crew

Role of the crew

The service crew carries out different functions in plane operations. The flight crew is responsible to gather on the flight release customs, which incorporated the climate information, the security of the flight notification to pilots, the tail assortment of the plane to be used all through the flight, and also the arrangement of the flight (Underwood & Waterson, 2013). On the airplane, we certainly have the ramp agent, who carries out duties in regards to verifying on the safety of the plane. Additionally there is the customer support agent who assist the customer on boarding on the correct airplane as well as providing guidelines, as they necessitate.

Role of the various administration personnel along with other members

For this specific flight bay, the LEX airport traffic control was staffed with one controller at the time of the accident plane preflight exercises, taxi, and attempt take off (Hollnagel, Pruchnicki, Woltjer & Etcher, 2008). The capacity of the controller function was for the general tower and in addition the radar positions. In the plane, there was clearly the captain who held an airline transport pilot certification in addition to a Federal Aviation exceptional medical certification, which was dated, twenty first of August in the 2006 with a confinement, which committed him to wearing remedial corrective lenses whilst working out on the rights of the certification (Dekker, 2015). The function of the captain is always to execute the taxi briefing before taxi and at the time of taxi to verbalize the vital aspects of taxi clearance, which are obtained, in addition accentuating on the runway crossings (Nelson, 2008). There was the first officer who retained an air travel transport pilot certification as well as an FAA first class medical certificate. The Comair employment as well as the flight data revealed the first class executive experienced accumulated 6564 hours in flying. The first officer function is always to help out with the flying of the airplane with the captain, he acts like the co-pilot. The plane Bombardier Cl-600-2B19, serial number 7472 was made in the month of January of 2001 and was delivered new to Comair. At the time of the crash, the plan had done 14, 536 overall flight hours as well as 12, 048 number of flight cycle (Conaway, 2016). Two crewmembers ought to monitor on the development of taxi by using on the horizontal condition indicators, airport diagrams, and airport signage to establish on the positions. There was a safety administration personnel’s during the time of the incident, they integrated the corporate conformity committee whose function was to evaluate on the security functionality metrics to attain on the security endeavors of the organization (Walmsley & Gilbey, 2016). The weather conditions forecast and exact conditions were sound (Wood, 2014). There were no constraints to distinctness that took place in the course of the planes taxi to the runway and attempt for the takeoff. Equally, taxi as well as attempt to takeoff took place around 1 hour before the sunrise in the course of WMV without any illumination from the moon (Zinser & General, 2006).

Role of the various administration personnel along with other members

Lessons learned and measures adopted to prevent similar accidents.

Various lessons could be learned from incidents of the plane crash such as the case above; one of the lesson is that the captain must have executed the taxi briefing before taxi as well as in the course of taxi to verbalize the vital aspects of taxi clearance, which are obtained, more so accentuating on the runway crossings. There could be concerns of exhaustion could be a prominent element in a plane crash. The captain and first officer ought to receive a lot more than the minimal needed relaxation time, particularly from a corresponding trip in earlier days (Hajdarbegovic, 2015). Regarding Comair flight crew performance, the board earlier mentioned that exhaustion was an impairment as the casual or perhaps the underlying cause of incidents.

There are methods of extenuating airport surface process issues they are; the enhancement of the flight deck area processes, execution of the cockpit shifting map displays or even the cockpit runway notifying systems, the upgrades on the surface of the airport indexing standards, alterations in the ATC guidelines (Conaway, 2016). These interventions provide distinct strategies to reduce on the outlook for the human flaws through the surface procedure and they took place to prevent it before a calamity (Underwood & Waterson, 2013). Furthermore, this kind of interventions they could assist to stop any kind of runway shortcomings, which is an issue on the security board list. Moreover, have learnt that people should play their own functions to the duties assigned. The case above present negligence of the pilot and the flight crew on their responsibility and if each person performed on their duties there is probable chance the accident would have been avoided.

Facet on the accident that tend to be intriguing for research

The facet, which is intriguing on the incident for the study, have been in the evaluation of the attempt to explore on the taxi and attempted takeoff progression. Moreover, as well as the connected human variable issues, survival elements, ATC staffing on workers as well as the attempt of alleviating the surface routing faults as well as other problems related to the accident of the flight.

References

Brown, L., & Whitehurst, G. (2012, May). Effects of Commuting on Crewmember Fatigue. In     Brown, L., Whitehurst, G.,(2011)“The Effects of commuting on Pilot Fatigue” International Symposium on Aviation Psychology Proceedings pg (Vol. 422, pp. 2-5).

Conaway, C. R. (2016). Pilot Designed Aircraft Displays in General Aviation: An Exploratory      Study and Analysis (Doctoral dissertation, Arizona State University).

data Jan-Dec, F. O. (2005). US Department of Transportation website.

Dekker, S. W. (2015). The danger of losing situation awareness. Cognition, Technology & Work, 17(2), 159-161.

Hajdarbegovic, D. (2015). Agent-based Approach to Retrospective Analysis of Aviation      Accidents (Doctoral dissertation, TU Delft, Delft University of Technology).

Hollnagel, E., Pruchnicki, S., Woltjer, R., & Etcher, S. (2008, April). Analysis of Comair flight     5191 with the functional resonance accident model. In 8th International Symposium of     the Australian Aviation Psychology Association (pp. 8-pages).

Kulesa, G. (2003). Weather and aviation: How does weather affect the safety and operations of   airports and aviation, and how does FAA work to manage weather-related effects?. In The Potential Impacts of Climate Change on Transportation.

Nelson, P. S. (2008). A STAMP analysis of the LEX COMAIR 5191 accident. Master’s thesis, Lund.

Recommendation, S. (2006). National Transportation Safety Board. Transportation.

Regulations, F. A. FAA Website. [Online] Federal Aviation Administration, 2007.

Underwood, P., & Waterson, P. (2013). Systemic accident analysis: examining the gap between   research and practice. Accident Analysis & Prevention, 55, 154-164.

Walmsley, S., & Gilbey, A. (2016). Cognitive Biases in Visual Pilots’ Weatherâ€ÂRelated Decision   Making. Applied Cognitive Psychology.

Wood, S. A. (2014). Damages Issues in Aviation and Catastrophic Accident Cases. The Brief,      43(4), 10.  

Zinser, T. J., & General, A. I. (2006). Observations on faa’s oversight of aviation safety.   Statement of the Acting Inspector General, US DOT before the Commitee on Transportation and Infrastructure, Subcommittee on Aviation, US House of Representatives.