Breaking silence of mourning: For nearly a year since the crash of Comair Flight 5191, Amy Clay, wife of pilot Jeff Clay, has been quiet while her late husband takes the blame. No longer.

Aug. 18--BURLINGTON -- Four hours into a July hearing in which the National Transportation Safety Board debated the cause of the crash of Comair Flight 5191, NTSB Chairman Mark V. Rosenker sidled up to pilot Jeffrey Clay's wife, Amy, and extended his hand.

Photographers waited nearby. Amy's brother-in-law James stepped into the breach, and Amy turned to face Rosenker.

"I am not your photo op," she said, coldly.

"Now," she recalled this week, "I'm a nice Southern girl, and I was polite enough. But I said if you want to talk to me, fine; but we'll do it alone and not after you've spent four hours hammering the father of my kids, finding new ways to call him stupid."

Amy Clay is now and forever the pilot's wife. She is OK with that if it means that she will be required to stand up for him whenever he is under attack. He has been since the day of the crash and will likely be for a long time now that the NTSB has concluded that the crash occurred because the pilot and co-pilot failed to make sure they were taking off from the correct runway.

She will not let such a conclusion stand without rebuttal.

"If it were turned around," she said in an interview at her home in Northern Kentucky, "he would not quit on me."

And so, almost a year after the Comair plane crashed at Blue Grass Airport after taking off from the wrong runway, she continues with what she calls "her agenda." After remaining quiet for a year, it is time for her to go on record, before the one-year anniversary of the crash, to be Jeff's wingman.

It is something, she admits, that she was too angry to do in July after the NTSB meeting.

Air transportation in this country, she says, was designed to be a system of interdependent parts, of which her husband was only one. She says that it was this system that conspired to deprive him of necessary information, ultimately letting him and his passengers down. She adds that the NTSB's single-villain conclusion conveys the message that "nobody but the crew is responsible" and that, if that's the case, "they better be able to read minds."

If that were true, she says again, "the only thing the airport needs is a windsock."

She is not finished. The easiest thing in the world to do, says the 35-year-old widow, is "blame the dead guy." That way, she adds, nobody has to fix anything, nobody has to spend anything, and nobody has to answer to anything because, they have said, as long as Jeff Clay is not flying you, you'll be fine.

"Every time I hear that 'the flight crew failed to use available cues and aids to identify the airplane's location,' I want to ask if getting up in the air was supposed to be some kind of a puzzle he was supposed to figure out by way of reading minds."

On the morning of the crash, Capt. Jeff Clay did not have an updated map of the airport's runways, which had been altered as part of a major construction project. Also, she reminds, he had no one watching from the tower. The lone air traffic controller on duty (there were supposed to be two controllers) turned his back after clearing the plane to take off.

Here was a guy, she says, who has a perfect flight record, who was meticulous and cautious and nothing like the cowboy she's heard him described as.

"I know a lot of people who have left the business this last year," she says, referring to pilots and flight officers. "Because they say, 'If this could happen to Jeff, it could happen to me, and I don't want to orphan my kids.' "

A morning of panic

On the morning of Aug. 27 last year, Amy Clay had gotten up at 6 a.m. She was still breast-feeding her 3-month-old, who had her first cold, so nobody was sleeping that well. As soon as she could, she and her two girls went back to sleep.

Around 8 a.m., a friend called and told her to turn on the TV. "That's really strange," she thought, not imagining that was Jeff's plane. The friend asked which flight Jeff was piloting that morning. "I couldn't remember. I should have had a clue, though, because of the panic in his voice."

When she hung up to check around the house to see if she could find Jeff's schedule, the phone rang. The caller ID said Comair.

Then she knew.

She called her neighbor, said "I have a problem. Can someone come help me?"

They did. They got Shelby and Sarah out of the house so she could wait for word. There were some news reports that a flight crew member had been pulled from the wreckage. (That rescued crew member, the only survivor among 50 people aboard, turned out to be co-pilot James Polehinke, who was severely injured and is now recovering in Florida.)

It was noon before she knew she was a widow with a 3-month-old and a 2-year-old, a funeral to plan and a mortgage.

Jeff's parents came from New Jersey. His mother wanted to be in Lexington because she believed Jeff's spirit to be in that field, just off Versailles Road.

Amy believed if Jeff's spirit was anywhere it was alighting in Burlington, with them, in the house he enjoyed fixing up, with the children he had been so in love with. She had no need to go to Lexington.

She was surrounded by loving friends. Even Jeff's best friends from his Rutgers days came immediately and returned to New Jersey only when she and Jeff's body went with them for burial.

It was four days before she ate again. The sheriff's department camped out at her house to keep the media away.

The funeral didn't happen for 10 days. First, the coroner had to release the body (which she never saw), then she decided to have him interred near his boyhood home in Vineland, N.J., because she was afraid that if she buried him in Kentucky, she would not be free to move away.

Jeff's birthday was Sept. 5, and she refused to have him buried that day, so the funeral took place on the 7th. A thousand people came.

'I don't sit around and sob'

Jeff and Amy met on Amy's 26th birthday, in a bar, and she wasn't as surprised as you might think that he showed. Every year her girlfriends would visit a tearoom near Orlando, Fla., and get a psychic reading on their futures. It was for laughs, but the woman said she'd meet her future husband on her birthday. That year, the girlfriends were at home and decided unless Amy wanted to marry the Domino's guy, they had to go out. So they did.

The New Jersey boy was immediately smitten. The Paintsville girl took a little more time.

Later, he loved being a father to his little girls, though his work took him away from home for 18 days of the month. He hadn't had a weekend off for three years.

Amy states, rather matter-of-factly, that she knows her daughters will have no memory of their father. Videotapes of him with them have now been transferred to DVD and are constantly cued up on the computer. Still, she believes sincerely that her girls "lost the better parent" and she will have to make up for that.

So she sweats. She runs six days a week. She lift weights. She has lost a lot of weight in the last year because putting on the iPod and not stopping to think is a way to deal with the loss of Jeff. Her favorite iPod treat is singing along with Dixie Chick Natalie Maines' Not Ready to Make Nice.

"I don't sit around and sob," she says. "I could make a choice. I could live in a pit or I could be a healthy mother."

A trained public relations professional who works out of her home, she has chosen to be in complete control of what she says, who she says it to and how she's portrayed.

She is emphatic. "We have a good life. My kids are healthy. We have a nice home. We are stable. We have a lot of friends. We have a wonderful family."

That doesn't mean she isn't tired.

Surviving, moving on

Amy Clay has been to Lexington only once since the crash that killed her husband. She was talked into that visit by her brother-in-law, James, who reminded her that this was the only chance she'd have to view the crash site. So she went because she's going to have to explain all this to her daughters one day.

She was escorted separately from the other families. She was surprised that the wreckage was still on the ground. She had thought she was going to look only at scorched earth and downed trees. Instead, she saw a hulking tomb for 49.

"There was no peace involved in that, though I'm not sorry I did it. It needed to be done."

She has read the transcript of her husband's last seconds but has not heard the audio recording of it.

In late October, she received a package -- "nicely presented" -- of her husband's things. His luggage. His watch. His wallet. Pictures of Amy and their children. His keys. His running shoes. His wedding ring came separately in May.

Today, Jeff is where his children are, she says. She talks to him when she needs to, appealing to him to -- among other things -- help her find things.

One day, she says, she awoke knowing she needed help. Her daughter Shelby then climbed into her bed and said, "Daddy said to give you a hug."

A year of newspaper stories about the crash has been carefully stashed in her attic. She says she'll read them someday.

She's lived through the worst day of her life. She's lived through the second -- that was the day of the July NTSB hearing, when "pilot error" was the focus of more than eight hours of grueling testimony and debate.

In light of that, the aftermath is survivable.

The first anniversary services are only a week away but, she says, in terms of commemorating the date, "I've not thought that far." She is quiet for a minute, then says, being that the anniversary is on a Monday, she'll probably take her kids to the pool.

Above her living room couch, in a gold frame, hangs a family portrait taken just four days before her husband's death. Her children are tow-headed baby beauties. He is alive. And she is beside him.

He was a great believer in loyalty, she says.

So is she.

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