Behind the Headlines

As we stood in that quiet farm field — a place that now looks like so many other postcards of Bluegrass horse country — we kept reminding each other of the trauma that had happened there. “Can you believe that this is the spot where so many people died?” we kept saying.

Of course, we hadn’t forgotten. Standing where we were standing, it was impossible to forget. But it just seemed like we needed to say something.

On Wednesday, Herald-Leader chief photographer Charles Bertram, visuals editor Ron Garrison and I drove out to the farm field where Comair Flight 5191 crashed on a Sunday morning almost a year ago. Charles, who was one of the first photographers to shoot pictures at the scene days after the crash, was returning (with the farm owner’s permission) to take photos of how the field had changed.

Ron and I had not been to the scene before, but — after a year of telling stories in words and visuals about the crash and its devastating toll — we both felt compelled to go.

I’m not sure what I was expecting from a place that spawned such terror and pain, a place where 49 people drew their last breath.

What I found was a peaceful hillside, the kind of rolling country and tree stands that define this region. As with all such things, nature has mostly retaken the place. Grass and weeds have covered the scars and scorch marks where the plane made impact. New foliage has already sprung from the wounds that the plane inflicted on trees. Two foals and a mare romped and played in paddocks not far from where the plane’s engines and fuselage came to rest.

These were all reassuring moments, spontaneous and life-affirming.

It would have been easy to mistake this for any other farm field. But every few minutes, a jet engine would rev as a plane prepared to take off on the Blue Grass Airport runway just a few hundred yards away. At one point, I admit, I held my breath as a plane turned toward the spot where we stood at the end of Runway 26, the airport’s short runway and the one mistakenly taken by the Comair plane. I exhaled when it completed the turn onto the main runway and took off flawlessly.

The planes aren’t the only reminder of what happened here.

A chunk of jagged metal remains deeply embedded in a gouge where the Comair plane’s wing first connected with a tree after speeding off the end of the runway. A bit of dark blue paint was pressed into another gouge on the tree next to it. Burns are still visible on the bark of the tree where the plane’s tail section came to rest. A few yellow flags — left from surveys of the crash scene — could be found in the underbrush. (The photo above, taken by Charles on Wednesday, looks back across the
field. The trees in the center were the first clipped by the plane.
Several other nearby trees that were leveled by the plane have been
removed.)

But that was it.

The rest was crickets and weeds, horses and birds, the occasional morning glory poking out above the mowed grass. A typical Kentucky hillside on a sweltering August day.

It’s a place that many families of the Comair passengers will visit on Monday after private memorial services marking the one-year anniversary of the crash. It’s a place where I hope they can find some measure of peace after an impossibly difficult year.

***

This weekend, the Herald-Leader and other media will bring you words and pictures intended to honor the lives of the people who died on Comair 5191. For our part, we decided that after hundreds of stories on the subject, we had few new words to add. So we offered a chance for the families of the Comair passengers and crew a chance to express their feelings and thoughts in their own words.

With help from Hospice of the Bluegrass, we sent a letter to the families, offering them a chance (if they wanted one) to write their own memorials of those they lost. The memorials they submitted started appearing Wednesday on Kentucky.com. We’ll run a few each day on Kentucky.com through this weekend, then collect all the memorials together in a special tribute on Sunday (when the public memorial service will be held at Southland Christian Church). More of Charles’ photos from the crash scene will also appear in Sunday’s paper.

After a year of editing stories about the toll of this tragedy and the reasons behind it, I found myself deeply affected by the tributes written by the families. Many remembered their loved ones in poetry, or in very personal letters laced with happy memories and indescribable grief. Others thanked the community for its support, or wrote of the pain of the last year.
I thank the families for their continued candor and eloquence, and their willingness to share such beautiful and raw emotions with us and our readers at such a difficult time.

Peter Baniak
metro editor