John Rhodes, Vice President of Bluegrass Airport was our guest today at the invitation of General Dan Cherry. John was involved in coordinating the airport's response to the awful tragedy of the crash of Flight 5191 in August of 2006. He talked about the all-out effort by airport personnel and the community. John told us that Bluegrass Airport has over 1,000,000 passengers a year. It has 15 gates and upwards of 84 flights per day. There are two runways. One is a 7000+ foot runway for commercial aircraft and a much shorter 3500 foot runway for daytime general aviation. The accident was attributed to the pilots mistakenly getting on the shorter runway.
John said he was awakened by a call to come in to work shortly after 6 a.m. the morning of the crash. A media center was quickly established across Versailles Road at Keeneland. John said the folks at Keeneland were extremely helpful and gracious. Later the Crowne Plaza Campbell House manager asked his registered guests to allow him to place them in neighboring hotels so he could provide the entire complex for family members and others directly involved. The owner of several Appleby's brought food on many occasions. In short things were handled well. John says their website had over 1 million hits in the first 24 hours after the accident. There were 6100 articles written nationally about the accident in the first four days.
Interestingly our own member, Dr. Sally Ray, is a leading authority on communications related to aircraft crashes. She and John are both Morehead graduates and Sally made a comment to the group that she had been in a NTSB meeting for two weeks some time after the crash. She said many of the people from NTSB went out of their way to comment on how impressed they were in the way the people in Lexington had responded.
Well we're having a great month learning things about aviation. General Cherry keeps tantalizing the group about an ACE ARMSTRONG that he's trying to line up for one of the two remaining programs he has. Could be very interesting as they used to say on Laugh In.
By the way I want everyone to know that I soloed a Cessna 150 at Bluegrass Field back in the late 1960's. As far as I know there was only one runway there at the time. Thank God I found it when I got ready to land.
