They almost made it.

Despite lining up for takeoff on the wrong runway, Atlanta-bound Comair Flight 5191 accelerated to 137 nautical miles an hour Sunday and had begun to lift its nose wheel off the ground when it charged off the darkened end of the 3,500-foot strip, went into the grass, collided with a grass berm and briefly became airborne, officials said Monday night.

The plane plowed through a fence nearly 400 feet from the runway end, jumped another fence at about 700 feet, then struck a stand of 50-foot tall trees and broke apart. The crash and ensuing fire killed 49 of the 50 people aboard the Canadair Regional Jet. First officer James Polehinke, who was at the controls, remains in critical condition.

"The aircraft weighed 49,087 pounds according to its manifest," Debbie Hersman, an NTSB member overseeing the investigation, told reporters at a briefing. "It needed 3,539 feet of runway to rotate the nose wheel at that weight."

Hersman said air traffic control and cockpit voice recorder tapes show that Capt. Jeffrey Clay, a seven-year veteran at Comair, and Polehinke believed they were on Runway 22, the 7,000-foot runway built for airliners and corporate jets. In fact, in Sunday's pre-dawn darkness, they had mistakenly aligned their jet with the much shorter, unlighted Runway 26.

Hersman said they noted during the takeoff roll that the runway lights were out, but it wasn't known whether they ever realized they were on the wrong runway.

Polehinke, 44, was at the controls at the time of the accident, officials said Monday.