Sides Debate If It Would Have Mattered With Comair 5191

In early 2006, faced with FAA staffing compliance issues, officials with Blue Grass Airport in Lexington, KY set up a plan with a regional radar center in Indianapolis to take over approach control duties on overnight shifts... as the tower's budget could not accommodate the cost.

The plan was never utilized and the tower was staffed with a single controller at night, in direct violation of federal requirements prohibiting a single controller from performing approach control and ground duties simultaneously.

On August 27, 2006, an LEX controller was doing just that when Comair Flight 5191 took off from the wrong runway and crashed killing 49 of 50 people on board. A probable cause report is due to be released in July.

A staffing study in April of this year concluded turning over radar duties to the Indianapolis Center was the most cost efficient means of complying with the federal guidelines. The $135,000 in overtime that would be required to fully staff the overnight shift far exceeded the tower's $17,000 overtime budget, according to the Lexington Herald-Leader.

"We're never going to be comfortable with that arrangement," Air Traffic Controller's Association spokesman Doug Church said. "There should always be local approach control 24-7 that knows the airspace like the back of their hand."

Besides, said Dave O'Malley, president of the Indianapolis Center NATCA local, Indy controllers are only trained to handle flights above 10,000 feet. Assuming LEX's radar duties on the night shift would have required learning lower altitude procedures.

According to FAA spokeswoman Laura Brown, LEX management wasn't aware that enacting such a plan would have required an airspace reclassification from midnight to 6:30 am, a long process requiring public input. The study "was only one piece of a discussion; it wasn't the final word," she said. This was why the plan was never authorized.

So, with that option was a no-go, a previous request for more money for overtime denied and not enough staff to fill two spots on the night shift, Blue Grass tower manager Duff Ortman and hub manager Darryl Collins told federal investigators they agreed to assign only one controller to overnight shifts after a controller retired in April 2006, according to the paper.

A report by the inspector general of the Department of Transportation released in March found that the FAA had no system in place to even make sure towers were able to remain in compliance with the staffing rules and part of the problem was "that the guidance, because it was communicated orally, was misinterpreted and inconsistently applied. Since the Comair accident, FAA has formalized the verbal guidance into a written order which was, in our opinion, an appropriate and necessary action," according to the report.

Would adequate staffing levels have made a difference to Flight 5191? We may never know, but since that accident, the tower at LEX has two controllers working the overnight shift; thanks, in part, to a new 2007 fiscal year overtime budget that was increased to $154,500.

FMI: www.bluegrassairport.com, www.faa.gov, www.natca.org, www.oig.dot.gov