Colgan-Buffalo crash...

[igneousy2]

Sorry can't let the Captain off the hook on this one.

Posters here are focusing on the day of the flight as the NTSB did, however, I believe think the error chain goes back way farther than that.

This was clearly a pilot who struggles...just good enough to scrape along, but we need to ask should we have pilots like this. Should Colgan have ever hired this pilot? Shouldn't Colgan's training program have caught the weakness. We are too much about checking boxes and giving partial credit. I do not believe I have ever heard of a training record of an active line pilot as bad as this one. It seems he had trouble passing not only every checkride but even recurrent events which are comparatively easy. A bad day once in awhile with 1/2 a dozen busts over a 30 year career, I'll take it! Trouble in EVERY SINGLE EVENT! COME ON! Training departments have become much too accomodating.

As far as what happened at the marker, instructing in Cessna 152's (Stalls are EVENTS in 152s compared to the "was that a stall" stall in Cherokees) I saw MANY students do EXACTLY what this Captain did at the marker and that is FREEZE. He saw the attitud indicator pitch down and he hugged the yoke in his chest all the way to the ground, the whole time disbelieving the fact that the nose wasn't coming up. It sometimes took a sharp jab to the ribs with the elbow to get students to let go of the controls.

In order to recover from a stall you must have the mental ability to turn off the animal-rote response...think back to your ground school about aerodynamics, and then execute a proper stall recovery. Some people have trouble with this...not everybody should be a Captain of an airliner. Tail-plane stall recovery? NOT A CHANCE...that requires taking TWO steps back and this crew hadn't even taken the first.

As far as the FO - I have to give her props for-if nothing else-she was still fighting in the end. I'm guessing PNF duties at Colgan, like all airlines, tend to get the PNF heads down right about the marker, checklist, fix the box, set tower frequency, what was ground frequency, missed approach altitude was...flaps 15? you got it...Then all hell breaks loose, you get the shaker...Captain fighting the controls....put the flaps back up...no, that didn't work, gear, "should the gear be up?" she was clearly still functioning...looking for the answer. The hope for this flight was with the FO, maybe if she had a little bit more time instructing and/or not been so tired...

 

[paid4training]

Sorry can't let the Captain off the hook on this one.

Posters here are focusing on the day of the flight as the NTSB did, however, I believe think the error chain goes back way farther than that.

This was clearly a pilot who struggles...just good enough to scrape along, but we need to ask should we have pilots like this. Should Colgan have ever hired this pilot? Shouldn't Colgan's training program have caught the weakness. We are too much about checking boxes and giving partial credit. I do not believe I have ever heard of a training record of an active line pilot as bad as this one. It seems he had trouble passing not only every checkride but even recurrent events which are comparatively easy. A bad day once in awhile with 1/2 a dozen busts over a 30 year career, I'll take it! Trouble in EVERY SINGLE EVENT! COME ON! Training departments have become much too accomodating.

As far as what happened at the marker, instructing in Cessna 152's (Stalls are EVENTS in 152s compared to the "was that a stall" stall in Cherokees) I saw MANY students do EXACTLY what this Captain did at the marker and that is FREEZE. He saw the attitud indicator pitch down and he hugged the yoke in his chest all the way to the ground, the whole time disbelieving the fact that the nose wasn't coming up. It sometimes took a sharp jab to the ribs with the elbow to get students to let go of the controls.

In order to recover from a stall you must have the mental ability to turn off the animal-rote response...think back to your ground school about aerodynamics, and then execute a proper stall recovery. Some people have trouble with this...not everybody should be a Captain of an airliner. Tail-plane stall recovery? NOT A CHANCE...that requires taking TWO steps back and this crew hadn't even taken the first.

As far as the FO - I have to give her props for-if nothing else-she was still fighting in the end. I'm guessing PNF duties at Colgan, like all airlines, tend to get the PNF heads down right about the marker, checklist, fix the box, set tower frequency, what was ground frequency, missed approach altitude was...flaps 15? you got it...Then all hell breaks loose, you get the shaker...Captain fighting the controls....put the flaps back up...no, that didn't work, gear, "should the gear be up?" she was clearly still functioning...looking for the answer. The hope for this flight was with the FO, maybe if she had a little bit more time instructing and/or not been so tired...

Hey, what the he!! About Cherokee's!!!!!????? You better watch it buddy!!!!

 

[Fubijaakr]

Here's the problem, Igy. They had been trained in recurrent about the hazards of tail plane icing. You ever experience it? I have.

It happened one day to me in a Convair 580 going into NGU. Blue sky day. However the mighty Queen of the Victor Airways had one fault. Her tail was directly in line with the exhaust out of the engines. As a result,we accreted a bunch of ice on the horizontal stab.

You select landing flaps and the nose pitches violently down. You have to slap the flaps back to 15 degrees, go to radar power and pull for all you're worth to get the beast to climb.

In the Colgan crash, that's almost exactly what the crew THOUGHT THEY HAD. They got slow and the stick pusher activated. Nose pitch over close to the ground and what is your first reaction, especially if tail plane icing is an emphasis item in recurrent?

Max power,flaps 15, pull the nose up. Unfortunately, they didn't have tail plane icing, stalled the airplane and spun in. What did the f/o do immediately? Slapped the flaps to 15. That tells me she thought they had tail plane icing. What did the CA do? Max power and redeefed the nose up. That tells me HE thought he had tail plane icing.

Oh, and btw, it takes about 800 to 900 feet to recover from tail plane icing (btdt) which is why we put a caveat in the Convair 580 NATOPS to be fully configured by 1500 ft agl. When it happened to me we were at 1100 feet and recovered about 250 to 300 feet. The houses look REALLY big at that altitude.

Now, I'm not defending the crew. They screwed up. However, given the traing they received, you can see how they could have misdiagnosed the problem they were facing. Think about our "emphasis" items. How many times do YOU see CAs or FOs going uncomfortably below the glide slope due to OUR emphasis items.

It's just food for thought. Go to the FAA website and search tail plane icing and watch their Twin Otter video. This is the video they showed to Colgan guys in recurrent. Perhaps we should cut the crew some slack...

 

[kf4amu]

There's no way this guy was skilled enough to identify and react to tail plane icing. He couldn't even monitor his airspeed.

 

[kmox29]

In the Colgan crash, that's almost exactly what the crew THOUGHT THEY HAD.

There is no evidence to suggest that. This specific possibility was addressed in the NTSB report.

This crew was startled, had no idea what was happening, and reacted poorly to a stalled aircraft relatively close to the ground.

 

[ultrarunner]

There's no way this guy was skilled enough to identify and react to tail plane icing. He couldn't even monitor his airspeed.

You're exactly right. Heck, those two pilots could barely make enough room in their conversation to run the checklists, let-alone have ANY sense of SA....

 

[Abernathy]

In the Colgan crash, that's almost exactly what the crew THOUGHT THEY HAD. They got slow and the stick pusher activated.

Have you actually seen the NTSB animation? It is nothing remotely close to the situation you described. The stick shaker activated first (obviously) and his immediate reaction was to pull. Then they got the pusher, and he kept pulling.

The nose didn't just pitch over violently by itself until the very end when it actually more like spiraled into the ground.

How it is that you are concluding that they thought it was a tail-plane stall out of this scenario is beyond me. Watch the NTSB animation:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vMy8kZ2_TMs

 

[igneousy2]

In the Colgan crash, that's almost exactly what the crew THOUGHT THEY HAD. They got slow and the stick pusher activated. Nose pitch over close to the ground and what is your first reaction, especially if tail plane icing is an emphasis item in recurrent?

I just don't follow your reasoning...they got slow...the natural reaction is to pitch down and add power. That is level one. Any profesional pilot, looking at their airspeed indicator, realizing they needed a lot of airspeed right now would have dumped the nose and added power without even thinking about it. This Captain did not misdiagnose the problem...this Captain shut down...he did not make ANY diagnoses, he had NO IDEA what the condition of his aircraft was in. He did not know his aircraft was stalled, he did not think his tail was stalled, he was along for the ride.

I will go out on a limb...I don't know if this has been tested, but I bet if the Captain had merely LET GO of the controls at the pusher the airplane would not have stalled.

 

[HalinTexas]

He did know enough to push the power fwd. Was it "radar power?' Doesn't look like it.

Every tail icing possibility is usually described occurring when "landing" flaps are selected, i.e. beyond approach flaps. In the demos I've seen it occurs in aircraft selecting flaps beyond 15 or 20º at the approximate moment that the flaps are selected. Recovery is to "undo what you just did." In either case, airspeed is your friend. Increase it, it gets friendlier.

If the captain had lowered the nose, or allowed the wing to unload, to the horizon, it most likely would have recovered if he not yanked it back up. By the time the FO retracted the flaps the aircraft was unrecoverable. She was thinking, sort of. She was not assisting. Neither pilot was communicating. If one would have said "stall" then it might have put them both on the same page.

Then again, if at least one of them was watching the airspeed, then this discussion would be moot.

 

[OurMoney1]

Even suggesting the left seat was concerned about possible tail ice is laughable. This guys history speaks volumes to gross incompetence. The F/O was along for the ride. Alot of innocent people died because someone who should have never been given the privilege to act as PIC slipped through the proverbial cracks.

You guys are beating the hell out of this one.

 

[Kaman]

You are missing a couple of important facts; the NASA video explains that tailplane stall recognition is not applicable to aircraft equipped with powered flight controls (rudder and elevator on the Q400), Aircraft equipped with a T-Tail configuration are not nearly as suceptible to tailplane icing like the SAAB. It is also very likely had the Captain released the controls at the sticker onset after applying power the airplane wil naturally seek it's trimmed airspeed after a series of convergent phugoids, because it is dsigned to be dynamically stable in the longitudenal axis. Basic aerodynamics all pilots are taught and should be able to apply. We will never know why both pilots lost their SA! but we know the outcome...

 

[Flyer1015]

even suggesting the left seat was concerned about possible tail ice is laughable. This guys history speaks volumes to gross incompetence. The f/o was along for the ride. Alot of innocent people died because someone who should have never been given the privilege to act as pic slipped through the proverbial cracks.

+1.000

 

[Flyer1015]

The extra zeroes had to be added cause post must be at least 5 characters.