1- All this arguing about the flaps is silly. Maybe they would have lost a little more altitude or taken a little longer to recover- that's it. Was it the wrong thing to do, yes- but who gives a ____! Heck, she probably could have shut down an engine and they still could have landed safely had he not done what he did. She committed one BIG error - didnt catch the speed bleeding off and smack him upside the head before he killed them all. Always assume that person next to you is going to screw the pooch at any moment and hope to god that they are doing the same!!
2- Those who argue that CFI experience is irrelevant need look no further than this. A thousand hours of pattern work, slow-flight, and stall practice would have done him a lot of good. A bunch of time in weather with instrument students in an older PA-, C- or BE with no autopilot would probably have been a good thing too...
3- There is little to no opportunity for most pilots starting out to really learn stuff. GA is dying or almost dead. The independent flight schools are dying or dead. The career track is the only way to go. Why instruct, tow banners, traffic watch, etc (if you can even find one of these jobs- and hauling checks is gone) when it is easier to get a RJ job with less time. "The Program" does not teach any deep knowledge of how to fly. It checks the boxes, runs through the curriculum and teaches the procedures. The airlines love these folks because the have an easier time getting through new-hire training and checking off that set of boxes. All is well as long as everything goes according to plan.
There is no ready solution. Heck, most of the instructors at the puppy mills are products of the same institutions. And their instructors were also, and so on. Some of the extra stuff, the weird stuff that isnt in the curriculum and only comes from seeing unexpected stuff happen in airplanes, gets lost with each generation. The highly motivated ones will see that there are gaps, and do the extra effort on their own and be just fine. But for every one of them, there will be many who are lazy or just dont even realize what they are not learning. And the system makes no differentiation between them. This is a situation that is slowly creating a big underlying problem in aviation. At my company, there seem to be more and more CYA memos, tech briefs and SOP changes coming out micro-managing procedures, trying to eliminate the need for actual understanding of what we are doing and the use of actual common sense. It would seem that both are lacking at times (managements performance is another topic altogether). That is in lieu of attempting to increase hiring standards, training standards, or just plain old better "pilot stuff".
That is some ramble-on-when-I-was-a-kid-I-walked-to-school-uphill-both-ways-in-the-snow-stuff, oh well- YMMV
"My mind is aglow with whirling, trasncient nodes of thought, careening through a cosmic vapor of invention"
"Ditto"
I misspelled one word whereas your entire post was written by Hooked on Phonics. Anyhow, my question remains unanswered: with respect to your challenge, what could the FAA have done about fatigue on the Colgan flight?
