Taxiway had been altered recently

Tuesday, August 29, 2006 A native of the Beloit area was listed among the 49 passengers killed in the crash. LEXINGTON, Ky. (AP) — The taxiway at Lexington's airport was altered during a repaving project just a week before a Comair jet tried to take off on the wrong runway and crashed, killing 49 people, the airport's director said Monday. Erik Harris, a Beloit-area native who attended West Branch schools, was listed among the dead passengers. No other information on him was available at presstime. Comair has said the company will not release an official list of the victims until all their families have been notified. Federal investigators said they were looking at such things as lights, markings and signs that may have confused the pilots, as well as anything that changed the configuration or appearance of the airport. Both the old and new taxiway routes cross over the short runway where Flight 5191 tried to take off before crashing into a grassy field and bursting into flame, Airport Executive Director Michael Gobb told The Associated Press. The repaving was finished one week before the crash, Gobb said. "It's slightly different than it used to be," said Charlie Monette, president of Aero-Tech flight school at the airport. "Could there have been some confusion associated with that? That's certainly a possibility." It was unclear whether the Comair pilots had been to the airport since the changes to the taxi route. Teacher confused Lowell Wiley, a flight instructor who flies almost every day out of Lexington, said in an interview that he was confused by the redirected taxi route when he was with a student Friday taking off from the main runway. "When we taxied out, we did not expect to see a barrier strung across the old taxiway," Wiley said. "It was a total surprise." Investigators planned to use a high truck to simulate the pilots' view of the runways and taxiways in their efforts to determine why the jet turned onto a shorter runway before dawn Sunday. The lone survivor was a critically injured co-pilot who was pulled from the cracked cockpit. Authorities planned to prepare a full report on the pilots, including what they did on and off duty for several days before the crash, which was the worst U.S. plane disaster since 2001. All discussions between the plane and the control tower were about a takeoff from the main strip, Runway 22, which is 7,000 feet long, National Transportation Safety Board member Debbie Hersman. Somehow, the commuter jet ended up on Runway 26 instead — a cracked surface about 3,500 feet long that forms an X with the main runway and is meant only for small planes. Aviation experts say the CRJ-100 would have needed 5,000 feet to get airborne. According to the NTSB database, there have been four accidents caused by pilots taking off on the wrong runway worldwide since 1982. "It's not common," Bill Waldock, aviation safety professor at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in Arizona.Air traffic controllers are not responsible for making sure pilots are on the right runway, said John Nance, a pilot and aviation analyst. "You clear him for takeoff and that's the end of it," Nance said. "It's not the duty of the controller to baby-sit every flight." Copyright 2006 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.