New WSJ article on awful Pilot Pay in Colgan crash

[NuGuy]

It's about risk management. All airlines have a "risk management" department that analyzes the company's practices, including hiring, scheduling, etc, and attach a dollar sign to a hull loss accident like this one and compare it to what they're saving by cutting those corners.

Heyas Lear,

Great post. You are dead on the mark.

Just to piggyback onto what you said: Contrary to popular opinion, management understands full well what motivates pilots AND how we do our jobs. Most guys want to get the job done and get home, and will take steps outside their job description to make sure that happens. Call the ramp multiple times to get them to do their jobs, sling the bags yourself, ask for reroutes to save time, whatever...

It has been shown time after time that when this cooperation stops, and pilot's STOP doing other people's jobs, the airline simply grinds to a halt. You need reasonable, intelligent, responsible people on site to manage operations, and pilots ARE IT. Pilots don't need to strike. Just do your job, and ONLY your job, and watch the fun.

In this respect, we are our own worst enemy. Everyone hates work, and just want's to be home, make the commute, hate to piss off the passengers, or whatever. It usually takes a LOT to piss off enough people to reach critical mass and there are always a few jackholes that will keep pulling no matter what.

Say after your event with the FO and the 747, you shut the game down and called the CP and said "I'm done, this guy is unsat, and the plane is parked until you get someone qualified". What would have happened?

Nu

 

[UALRATT]

firstthird wrote:



Look at the video of the NTSB recreation off the black box Chuck Yeager. You'll see that he got them into the stall... he was keeping the plane shiny side up and fighting it but it all went to hell went she put the flaps up at around 95 kias... he was screwed after that...

He got them into it... she killed them all. Just my opinion. I'll wait until the final report in about 8 months to tell you I told you so.

Tailhookah

Tail...You've got a beef against women pilots it seems. Read on s l o w l y. The pilot flying gets himself in a stall condition which quickly proceeds into an UNUSUAL Attitude NOSE high condition. If you recover from this unusual attitude it will assist with stall recovery (reducing your AOA). The recovery procedures trained to me from private pilot and instrument training thru my airline profession, and for which I have trained has always been the same. You LOWER the nose (FORWARD pressure), roll the wing (his airplane is already rolling to the left - keep the roll going, DON"T fight it) while simultaneously adding FULL, and I repeat FULL power. Allow the nose to drop through the horizon before reversing the roll to a wing level condition and slowly recover from the ensuing dive. So you level off at 500 feet AGL- better than fighting the stall right into the ground.Take a closer look at his control imputs in the various stages of his nose high attiude and the resulting control imputs. My friend you don't fight a stall. You RECOVER from it. They both were not ready to fly that evening.

 

[Lear70]

Say after your event with the FO and the 747, you shut the game down and called the CP and said "I'm done, this guy is unsat, and the plane is parked until you get someone qualified". What would have happened?

The first F/O who froze removed himself from flying after we returned to base, saying the event had "scared" him. It was just a flaps fail and a routine return to DTW with a zero-flap overweight landing. An abnormal, with 10,000+ feet of asphalt to stop on, but... whatever.

The 747 guy was removed and sent back to a check airman. To my knowledge, this guy was the lowest time pilot ever hired at PCL (340-something hours TOTAL time). After another month of O.E. focusing on situational awareness, he was sent back to the line.

That's the problem, there's so many pilots out there willing to step up and do the job for nothing, and no restrictions on the airlines from hiring them, that the practice will continue when pickings get slim for regional new-hires again. The ONLY way to fix the puppy mill problem is to regulate away from it by putting higher minimum flight time requirements for 121 flight crews to be hired to begin with.

Our pay overall is exactly as you described... nothing will fix it until pilots as a GROUP stand up and quit going the extra mile, doing only their job, and the operation ceases to function properly, costing the company more time and money than it would cost just to compensate us properly to begin with. That assessment of yours is dead-on!

 

[Whine Lover]

Question: Does the Q-400 have auto-throttles?

Auto-pilot was on for the approach so one would assume auto-throttles were too ( if installed ).

Who was running the power?

Apparently, niether the crew nor the auto-flight system.

Why?

YKMKR

Okay, I answered my own question thank you.

No auto-throttles + partial automation + marginal situational awareness = BAD



.

 

[eaglesview]

I agree with some of your points, but the real blame lies in airline management! Anytime a regional airline becomes successful as a company and the pilot group is able to achieve improvements in their contract. That regional immediately lands on the majors radar and loses flying.

This has happened time and time again at the regional level. United did it to both ACA and Air Wisconsin, Usair also did it to Air Wisconsin, Delta did it to Comair, and in this very instance Continental did it to ExpressJet. Until quality receives a higher priority then price it is only going to get worse! When safety is the key factor in the management decision making process and not the shareholders and bonuses thing may start to get better!

I couldn't agree more. It is a huge problem generated by airline management greed. The end result being different levels of quality (translated into safety) at the regional level. Ual, the company I work for is one of the worst offenders, it's all quite sickening.

 

[Wesb737fo]

I couldn't agree more. It is a huge problem generated by airline management greed. The end result being different levels of quality (translated into safety) at the regional level. Ual, the company I work for is one of the worst offenders, it's all quite sickening.

Bingo, "Management Greed". CNN ran a story this morning and almost got to the meat of the matter. I remember one anchor saying " I bet the travelling public didn't know these pilots were paid that little". The other anchor smirked saying " Now they do".

Geeeezzz. Give me a break. The traveling public has the attention span of my two year old. Brittany Spears will show her hootchie on camera next week and this will all be forgotten.

The real story that should have been reported is WHY? Why are these pilots paid so little. Management greed. Find the cheapest labor.

These guys were put in this situation by management greed. Why on earth is a 78 seat airliner not being flown by Continental pilots with much more experience. Management greed.

Before anyone gets their undies in a bunch because they think I'm picking on less experienced pilots, relax, I'm not because I was one of those guys who flew for a much maligned regional in the northeast with only 600 hours of flight experience for 15K a year over a dozen years ago. The only difference is that a 19 seat Beech 1900 is harder screw up. I've seen and heard alot of things that the traveling public would definitely be shocked over. Anybody remember a little incident where a pilot with barely 1 year of 121 time, upgraded to EMB-145 CA (with some difficulty I hear) and nearly crashed, with the resulting incident only costing the careers of several involved.

The commuters used to be a place to break in (a stepping stone) to a job with larger equipment and better pay. Now it is a source of cheap labor so Airline Management can hang on to every inch of market share using ever larger and complex equipment without paying for experienced labor.

So the real story is the race to the bottom which is, as of yet, not being reported.

 

[Linedriver]

They misinterpreted this as an icing tail-plane stall which would have been the correct procedure. After the conversation of heavy icing what would your initial response be.......

Ok, I think you guys are digging way too deep here. We have discussed this for 6 pages and several days now to try to figure out what this guy was thinking in less than one second.

He wasn't thinking, he panicked. He didn't mis-interpret this as a tail stall and he wasn't fatigued. Stall recovery wasn't second nature with this captain and that is why they crashed.

Your stall warning gets its information from the leading edge of the wing, not the tail. If the tail had stalled the nose would have simply pitched over with no other warning - no stick shaker, no stick pusher. The wing is still flying in a tail stall.

They were also discussing something that wasn't pertinent to THIS flight at a critical phase of flight, in less than ideal conditions. This further divided their attention and put them at even more risk.

This is good discussion and I hope some guys get some good information from it. It was around 25 seconds from first indication of a stall to impact. Things can happen that fast.

 

[jonjuan]

He wasn't thinking, he panicked. He didn't mis-interpret this as a tail stall and he wasn't fatigued. Stall recovery wasn't second nature with this captain and that is why they crashed.

That's it in a nutshell. As LR70 said, I also think the F/O panicked and raised the flaps because she thought she caused the shaker by lowering them.
Why not an ungraded demonstration in the simulator of this near the deck say by the instructor immediately dumping 30 knots? The focus should be on not panicking or starting to just flip things and yank things. Maybe one of those airhorns should be used more often in the sim during critical phases of flight.

 

[tailhookah]

UALRATT wrote:

Tail...You've got a beef against women pilots it seems. Read on s l o w l y. The pilot flying gets himself in a stall condition which quickly proceeds into an UNUSUAL Attitude NOSE high condition. If you recover from this unusual attitude it will assist with stall recovery (reducing your AOA). The recovery procedures trained to me from private pilot and instrument training thru my airline profession, and for which I have trained has always been the same. You LOWER the nose (FORWARD pressure), roll the wing (his airplane is already rolling to the left - keep the roll going, DON"T fight it) while simultaneously adding FULL, and I repeat FULL power. Allow the nose to drop through the horizon before reversing the roll to a wing level condition and slowly recover from the ensuing dive. So you level off at 500 feet AGL- better than fighting the stall right into the ground.Take a closer look at his control imputs in the various stages of his nose high attiude and the resulting control imputs. My friend you don't fight a stall. You RECOVER from it. They both were not ready to fly that evening.

No I have a beef about stupidity. HE got them into it but maybe would've gotten out of it had the flaps not come up on them... the plane pitches over as the flaps come up... now the stall-fly margin is even further away and they now have even less altitude (1600 AGL up in BUF) to do it in. Had the flaps stayed at 10 or 15 where they were supposed to be I'd say as the plane pitched over to the right and nose down they had a good chance to pull it out. But since the flaps were coming up they needed to build another 20 kias or so before the plane was flyable. So read s l o w l y here guy... or girl. I'm not against women in the cockpit. I'm against stupid CA's and FO's that don't belong there and do stuff like raise the flaps during a deep stall w/o being commanded to do so.

All of you out there who don't think the flaps coming up during this was significant need to review Aero 101... that plane was very close to flying speed when it pitched over w/ the flaps at 10. Then it becomes a nose low unusual attitude which we all practice every time we go back to the school house. But what you don't practice at the school house is your FO raising the flaps at that critical time at 1600 AGL as your plane departs... because it's moot. Most of the time you'll crash. But if you keep your configuration then you have a good chance of pulling it out. The hard and sudden departure where it flips totally over and fully departs comes after the flaps are fully up as he's pulling to get out of it. That departure doesn't come before the flaps are moved but after.

He should've never got into that situation. I hope I never have to flight test that scenario... but we all could be there next week. If that were to ever happen to me, I hope my FO doesn't raise my flaps w/o being told to do so.

Tail

 

[~~~^~~~]

Bingo, "Management Greed".

The real story that should have been reported is WHY? Why are these pilots paid so little. Management greed. Find the cheapest labor.

These guys were put in this situation by management greed. Why on earth is a 78 seat airliner not being flown by Continental pilots with much more experience. Management greed.

....

So the real story is the race to the bottom which is, as of yet, not being reported.

Well that... and a union that decided outsourcing is a good thing.

 

[~~~^~~~]

UALRATT wrote:

I hope my FO doesn't raise my flaps w/o being told to do so.

Tail

Just adding to your point .... I hope we have the presence of mind to slap the handle back where it should be. New First Officers do stupid stuff when they are inexperienced and fatigued. Heck, I do stupid stuff when I'm tired and new on a aircraft.

Hell, I took an airplane from a line check airman, got it back on profile and configured, then gave it back to him. His one word de-brief was "thanks."

We are pilots. We have the ability to both screw things up and responsibility to unscrew them.

 

[FlyinGuy]

CA forgot power....FO raises flaps at a critical time....Crew fatigued.... these are all causes in this crash. The CA will take most of the blame because he was flying and he was the CA. This is a tragic accident and because there were so many different causal events that happened at once they did not stand a chance.


For what it is worth......when I was in the AF, we had a near accident that was very similar to this event. Power left at idle on level off at FAF, mis-identification of the cause (possible in this one), and fatigue.

It is very easy and tempting to criticize this crew, but what we need to do is focus on what we would do in our cockpits and learn from their mistakes. It is easy to say it will never happen to me, but remember every accident is a chain of events. I am sure that all of us can point to a flight in our career when things went bad. Was a chain broken or were we superior avaitors.....my vote is for the chain!

 

[imacdog]

The CA's response to the stall was so far off that it doesn't matter what the FO did - that type of mishandling does not lead to a recovery. He had the yoke in his lap all the way to the ground.

 

[jonjuan]

For what it is worth......when I was in the AF, we had a near accident that was very similar to this event. Power left at idle on level off at FAF, mis-identification of the cause (possible in this one), and fatigue.

Speaking of which, wasn't the C-5 crash in Dover flown by some pretty experienced instructor pilots? If I recall correctly, didn't they let the stall the plane by not watching the speed?
Here it is...
http://www.af.mil/news/story.asp?storyID=123021742
It can happen to the most experienced out there.

 

[Linedriver]

The CA's response to the stall was so far off that it doesn't matter what the FO did - that type of mishandling does not lead to a recovery. He had the yoke in his lap all the way to the ground.

Yep...