Part 2 same article...
According to the Department of Transportation, the last six fatal commercial aviation accidents in the United States involved regional air carriers. The most recent was the Feb. 12 crash of Continental Connection Flight 3407 near Buffalo, which killed all 49 people onboard and one on the ground. Federal investigators have called it the deadliest U.S. transportation accident in seven years, and it offers a window into working conditions in the regional airline world.
Colgan operated Flight 3407, but
Continental Airlines sold the tickets and draped the plane in company colors. The plane's co-pilot, Rebecca Shaw, lived with her husband in her parent's Seattle home, thousands of miles away from her pilot base in Newark.
On the night before the accident, Shaw flew to Newark as a passenger on a FedEx plane. Along the way, according to federal investigators, she told an inquiring FedEx pilot that she didn't have a crash pad. She also said there was a couch in the Colgan crew room at Newark "with her name on it."
The National Transportation Safety Board has yet to determine the cause of the Colgan accident. But investigators, congressional committees and other federal officials are delving into a number of problems brought to light by the crash, including excessive commuting by flight crews, industry hiring practices, corporate financial pressures and crew member fatigue.
"I think the accident should serve as a wake-up call," said Charlie Preusser, 30, a pilot who worked at Colgan in 2007 and lived in a crash pad in Albany, N.Y. "We are putting pilots in compromising situations. Airlines are being allowed to push pilots way too much."
However, Williams, the Pinnacle spokesman, said: "On average, Colgan pilots fly less than five hours a day and average 50 hours a month. It is a rare occasion to actually exceed seven hours flying and extremely rare to legally exceed eight hours."
While working for Colgan as a co-pilot, Preusser shared a crash pad with about seven other people. Most of the time, he slept on an air mattress.
At Colgan, Preusser said, he took home about $20,000 a year piloting a Beechcraft 1900D, a turboprop that flies 19 passengers, a load so small that the airline wasn't required to have a flight attendant onboard. As the first officer, or second-in-command, he seated passengers, conducted the safety briefing and checked seat belts before taking his chair in the cockpit. He generally flew up to six departures a day.
Today, half of all scheduled flights in the United States are operated by regional airlines. Pay rates are rooted in a complicated system dating to the 1920s and '30s that takes into account the size and weight of the airplane, pilot rank and even plane speed.
Airline bankruptcies since the 2001 terrorist attacks have also left a deep impact, driving down pay by 30 to 50 percent, according to the Air Line Pilots Association, the nation's largest pilot union. Senior pilots on the largest airliners earned as much as $300,000 a year. Those pilots saw their annual pay shaved to $170,000. In the regional world, $100,000-a-year captains dropped to $80,000. Those in the $40,000 range fell to $30,000. Now, first-year pilots in the industry can make as little as $20,000. Flight attendants make even less.
"It was a huge step back," said Paul Rice, first vice president of the ALPA. "Most pilots lost pension and a lot of contractual work rules that revolve around scheduling."
In the past, regional airline pilots would live "continuously hand-to-mouth" for a couple of years, building their résumés with the hope of being promoted to a better-paying captain's job, Preusser said. That captain's job, in turn, could be a launching pad to a better-paying position at a major airline. But those expectations have been disrupted by the economic downturn, which has led to steep financial losses and route and employment cutbacks.