Crash plane was on wrong runway

Investigators probing Sunday's crash of a commuter aircraft in Kentucky at the weekend killing 49 people, leaving only a single survivor, were trying to determine yesterday why the plane had attempted to take off from Lexington's Blue Grass Airport from the wrong runway.

While the plane's owner, Comair, a regional carrier for Delta Air Lines, refused to speculate on the cause of the accident, there seemed little doubt last night that the choice of the wrong runway was the major factor.

The plane, a CRJ-100 made by Bombardier of Canada, crashed into farmland barely a mile from the airport. The nose of the burnt-out fuselage lay directly in line with the shorter runway, where all the lights were "out of service" at the time of the accident, and damaged trees showed the path from the runway to the crash site. Light rain was falling at the time of the flight's departure, en route to Atlanta, shortly after 6am on Sunday. The runway the pilot used was 3,500ft, half the length of the main runway. The plane normally calls for at least 5,000ft. Just before departure, the pilots indicated to the control tower that they would be using the longer runway as usual.

A local police officer reached into the burning cockpit and extricated the co-pilot, who remained in a critical condition yesterday.