Commuter jet Comair Flight 5191 taking off for Atlanta crashed just passed the runway

LEXINGTON, KY. -- A commuter jet mistakenly trying to take off on a runway that was too short crashed into a field yesterday and burst into flames, killing 49 people and leaving the lone survivor -- a co-pilot -- in critical condition.

Foreign Affairs in Ottawa said two Canadians were among the dead passengers. Further details were not available.

Preliminary flight data from Comair Flight 5191's black box recorders and the damage at the scene indicate the plane, a Canadian-built CRJ-100 regional jet, took off from the shortest runway at Lexington's Blue Grass Airport, National Transportation Safety Board member Debbie Hersman said.

The 1,066-metre-long strip unlit and barely half the length of the airport's main runway, is not intended for commercial flights.

The twin-engine CRJ-100 would have needed 1,525 metres to fully get off the ground, aviation experts said.

It wasn't immediately clear how the plane ended up on the shorter runway in the predawn darkness.

There was a light rain and the strip veers off at a V from the main runway, which had just been re-paved last week.

"We will be looking into performance data, we will be looking at the weight of the aircraft, we will be looking at speeds, we will pull all that information off," Hersman said.

The Atlanta-bound plane plowed through a perimeter fence and crashed in a field about a kilometre from the end of Runway 26.

FAA spokeswoman Laura Brown said the agency had no indication terrorism was involved in what was the country's worst domestic plane crash in five years.

Comair president Don Bornhorst said maintenance for the plane was up to date and its three-member flight crew was experienced and had been flying that airplane for some time.

Bombardier Aerospace, which built the plane, will send product safety and technical experts to the scene of the crash said a spokesman in Montreal.

"It's an unfortunate, tragic event, but certainly the aircraft has a very good, I'd say exceptional, safety record," said Bert Cruickshank.