Especially since the crash of Comair Flight 5191 last year, it’s a phrase that brings the Herald-Leader newsroom to an abrupt halt: “plane crash.” So when reports began rolling in that a plane might have crashed near the Whitley-Knox county line about 5 p.m. Tuesday, the newsroom got pretty quiet. Then, we set about finding out what had happened. What we — and other media — found out was a good reminder about the importance of finding out all the facts, and a lesson in how quickly a story can change. In this case, the ending was a welcome one — even though the story turned out to be a non-story.
On its 5 p.m. newscast, one Lexington TV station quoted the mayor of Williamsburg saying that emergency crews were on standby to be deployed to the site of an apparent plane crash. Another station quoted the local judge executive saying the same thing. Other stations broke in with eyewitness accounts of a low-flying plane trailing smoke, loud noises, windows shaking in homes on the ground below. At least two stations even reported on their Web sites that reports had been “confirmed” that a military plane had crashed. Stations reported what kind of plane it was and where it “went down.” Other stories on the evening news got pushed aside, as witnesses were interviewed live on the phone. Quickly, the story got picked up by out-of-state and national media outlets.
Curiously, all of the witnesses said they saw a plane flying low (some said it was trailing smoke). But no one actually saw a plane crash. Meanwhile, local emergency officials said they weren’t finding any wreckage or evidence of an actual crash.
At the Herald-Leader, we posted a short story on Kentucky.com at 5:45 saying that officials were investigating witness reports of a possible crash. We updated that story when Kentucky National Guard officials reported that all of their planes and people were accounted for. Meanwhile, we dispatched a reporter and photographer to the area — just in case the reports proved to be true. Three Herald-Leader reporters in Lexington, one in Frankfort and one in Washington worked the phones, trying to confirm whether a crash had indeed taken place. By 6:30, it became clear that there had been no crash. Officials on the ground said they had found no evidence of a crash; Federal Aviation Administration officials said no crash had been reported to them. Finally, the Kentucky National Guard said that one of its planes had been flying low in the area, but it landed safely as planned in North Carolina. We quickly updated Kentucky.com to reflect that no crash had taken place.
“All of our folks and all of our planes are accounted for,” Col. Ken Dale of the 123rd Operations Command of the Kentucky Air National Guard told reporter Steve Lannen. “We were in the area, and a lot of times when we enter a low-level structure, we will descend rapidly to 500 feet… Our engines put out quite a bit of smoke. People will see that and think it’s an aircraft in distress, and those type of reports get made.” Added Dale: “Somebody reported it, and the news ran with it. It was unconfirmed, and they reported there was an accident and there wasn’t one.”
You can read the end result of all that reporting and behind-the-scenes scrambling in a short story on Kentucky.com and a news brief on page B3 of the Wednesday newspaper — both explaining a plane crash that wasn’t.
Peter Baniak
metro editor
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