Interesting Colgan transcript tidbits

[CopilotDoug]

With that said, the caliber of the pilots at the regionals, especially today is something that needs to be studied... the type of person that would work for $17K a year with in this environment where the majors all still have 1000's on furlough and no hiring in sight has to be a person that lacks a certain maturity and quality about them, i.e Caliber.

Quality people seek good paying jobs, or if they're going to work for poor wages, they will have an endgame and an end in sight for accepting those wages...

And this is a valid point and another contributing factor. Many of the products cranked out by the pilot-mills (a la GIA) are approaching aviation from a totally different mindset. The regional airline they're at isn't so much a chance to gain and learn valuable experience...it's a just a means to get in that coveted left seat at Southwest...or Airtran. It's how they fundamentally approach flying: Take the quickest path of least resistance. Inevitably, some can't hack it and look for "shelters" to keep them off the line. They're known as union reps.

 

[DX Rick]

No, I wouldn't, but I generally avoid most regional flights because of the lack of experience up front. But, and this is important, I DON'T BLAME MY FELLOW PILOTS, I BLAME MANAGEMENT AND THE SYSTEM!!!!! This crew wasn't at fault for not having the proper experience. Management and the FAA told them that they were perfectly qualified to fly this airplane in this environment. If the FAA had proper minimums for flying Part 121, then this couldn't have happened. If management had cared more about finding qualified applicants, even if meant paying more to get them, then this wouldn't have happened. If management and the FAA would provide schedules that don't induce fatigue, then this wouldn't have happened. If management hadn't intimidated this FO into not calling in sick, then this wouldn't have happened. Seeing a trend here?

Many things contribute to an accident. Just placing blame on the pilots does no good. The inexperienced pilots were placed in this situation by negligent managers and government bureaucrats that care more about protecting commerce than customers. Focus on the true culprits, not the pilots that paid for their inexperience with their own lives.

He was just as experienced as you. Both GIA grads.

 

[flynryan15]

He was just as experienced as you. Both GIA grads.

DING DING DING we have a winner!

 

[LazyLightnin']

He was just as experienced as you. Both GIA grads.

You know how the saying goes, you forget what you pay for.

 

[oceandude]

ahhhh...the microwave generation rears its ugly head...sad it had to come to this.

 

[PBRstreetgang]

Both you and SEVEN are totally missing the point. Why were these pilots in this cockpit in the first place?

You know why I would never put my loved ones on a regional airline? Because of the lack of pay and poor quality of life that these pilots are faced with.

I know what its like to be overworked and underpaid. You make basic, silly mistakes. If you say that you would never make a basic mistake while fatigued you have never been fatigued.

I can't understand how other pilots who are working in terrible conditions can hang other pilots out to dry who were forced to work in terrible conditions.

No one has even mentioned that the SIC was suffering from some kind of inner ear condition. Way to stand up for each other guys.

Again I am ashamed to be a pilot. No safety improvements will come from these 50 deaths that you both seem so concerned about until the FAA addresses low pilot pay and fatigue.

I will make it simple. Those of us who have worked for the worst of the worst(TSA late 90s) know all to well, to have a chance of living to go home, we had to have an enhanced sense of survival. That meant we not only had to look forward, we had to watch out for the harpoon coming from behind us. Icing is easy, flight managers who threaten crews for various reasons are the tough ones, I had a manager tell me "if you won't fly it we will find someone who will". Pilot pay and work rules are not the central theme here, the f/o just had what, 22 days off and commuted in at the last minute. personal responsibility is the question here, bad work rules and chitty companies doesn't relieve the pilot from doing the right thing(comming to work rested and not sick), it just makes it harder. Do I feel bad for the pilots families, yup, the pax families, you betcha! I just wish the pilots had stayed home and stuck loaded shotguns into their pie holes and pulled the triggers and this would have just been a wierd double suicide instead of mass manslaughter event. The rules won't change, these pilots killed the pax and themselves via incompetence. Low pay and fatigue RULES are not factors here, sorry, basic competence is though.
Harsh, yup, but then so are 50 needless deaths!
PBR

 

[CopilotDoug]

He was just as experienced as you. Both GIA grads.

With any luck, PCL will be elected as an ALPA rep at AirTran. Then the flying public won't be exposed to the dangers of his sub-par flying abilities.

 

[slider]

So what I'm hearing from you is that these pilots should have no responsibility in this because it's everyone elses fault?

These pilots made basic mistakes that have made families who lost their loved ones suffer needlessly. These families will have to endure pain the rest of their lives. This accident should have never happened.

Why don't you express yourself to the mothers, fathers, brothers, sisters, loved ones who lost family on this flight and see how much empathy you get.

If it was your loved ones on that flight would you still be coddling and making excuses for the pilots?

What is it with people like you? How did you all of a sudden come to the extreme conclusion that the pilots had no responsibility whatsoever from what BushwickBill said… are you mental? This is exactly what is wrong with our industry and even our country as a whole. This binary thinking which is so basic and elementary not only to the human mind but even in the animal kingdom has led to normal issues becoming divisive and has taken divisive issues and magnified them. If you do not posses the ability to keep things in context or conceptualize proper context then please recognize that limitation within yourself and keep our opinion to yourself. Realize that you are doing no good in furthering the discussion and ultimately resolving the matter resulting in a safer more equitable system for all involved. This type of emotional, quarrelsome reasoning… right v. wrong, liberal v. conservative, yes or no, black or white has got to stop right NOW, it is employed by agenda driven individuals, and has no place in a coherent, analysis oriented discussion.

 

[BushwickBill]

What is it with people like you? How did you all of a sudden come to the extreme conclusion that the pilots had no responsibility whatsoever from what BushwickBill said… are you mental? This is exactly what is wrong with our industry and even our country as a whole. This binary thinking which is so basic and elementary not only to the human mind but even in the animal kingdom has led to normal issues becoming divisive and has taken divisive issues and magnified them. If you do not posses the ability to keep things in context or conceptualize proper context then please recognize that limitation within yourself and keep our opinion to yourself. Realize that you are doing no good in furthering the discussion and ultimately resolving the matter resulting in a safer more equitable system for all involved. This type of emotional, quarrelsome reasoning… right v. wrong, liberal v. conservative, yes or no, black or white has got to stop right NOW, it is employed by agenda driven individuals, and has no place in a coherent, analysis oriented discussion.

Nice. Thanks.

 

[HA25]

What is it with people like you? How did you all of a sudden come to the extreme conclusion that the pilots had no responsibility whatsoever from what BushwickBill said… are you mental? This is exactly what is wrong with our industry and even our country as a whole. This binary thinking which is so basic and elementary not only to the human mind but even in the animal kingdom has led to normal issues becoming divisive and has taken divisive issues and magnified them. If you do not posses the ability to keep things in context or conceptualize proper context then please recognize that limitation within yourself and keep our opinion to yourself. Realize that you are doing no good in furthering the discussion and ultimately resolving the matter resulting in a safer more equitable system for all involved. This type of emotional, quarrelsome reasoning… right v. wrong, liberal v. conservative, yes or no, black or white has got to stop right NOW, it is employed by agenda driven individuals, and has no place in a coherent, analysis oriented discussion.

Well said, I like this a lot.

BTW, is that Bianca Beauchamp in your Avitar? if so PM me for an interesting tidbit.

 

[BushwickBill]

How safe are US regional airlines?


By Zoe Conway
BBC News, Washington


Seven of the last eight fatal commercial plane crashes in the US involved regional airlines.


The most recent accident, in which a Continental Connection plane crashed into a house near Buffalo, New York, left 50 people dead.
Investigators have not yet said what caused the crash, but central to their inquiry have been questions about the crew's experience, training and working conditions.
And safety experts are asking the very same questions about the regional airline industry as a whole.
Second jobs
Alex Lapointe loves flying, which is fortunate, because he cannot be doing it for the money.
Just 24 years old, First Officer Lapointe has been a regional airline pilot for the last three years.
Like many regional carriers - which typically operate planes carrying fewer than 100 passengers - the company he works for pays a starting salary of around $20,000 (£13,256).
Some of his young pilot friends are saddled with more than $100,000 in student loans and he says many of them have taken second jobs.
"A lot of people I know have trade jobs or construction work they do electrical work. Some still work at the airport they grew up with pumping gas or working the line - anything they can to make an extra few dollars," he says.

“ There's no good way to teach good judgement - only experience really can develop that ”
Patrick Smith Pilot and columnist

He thinks that the new recruits are tiring themselves out and it is having an impact on safety.
"They don't have enough time to enjoy their days off and they're constantly working - they're doing the grind 24/7. When it's the fourth leg on a heavy flying day and the first officer's flying and the captain's working the radios and there's a hundred things going on, you're going to want both people in the cockpit well rested," says First Officer Lapointe.
Fatigue has long been of concern to the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB), the federal agency responsible for investigating plane crashes in America.
In a number of recent regional accident reports, they concluded that pilot fatigue was partly to blame:

• When a Corporate Airlines flight crashed in Kirksville, Missouri, in 2004, the NTSB said that fatigue contributed to the pilots' "degraded performance"
• It found that the captain of a Delta Connection plane which overran the runway in Cleveland, Ohio, in 2007, had slept for only one of the previous 32 hours
• When later that same year a Canadair jet overran the runway in Traverse City, Michigan, the NTSB ruled that fatigue was the likely cause of "poor decision-making"

Now the NTSB is investigating another regional accident where fatigue could have been a factor. Continental Connection Flight 3407 crashed near Buffalo, New York in February this year. All of the 49 passengers and crew on board died, as well as one person on the ground.
Pilot hours
In the immediate aftermath of the crash, speculation focused on the idea that an ice build-up on the wings had affected the plane's performance.


While ice has not been ruled out as a factor, the NTSB - which is holding a public hearing into the crash this week - has announced that the "circumstances of the crash have raised several issues that go well beyond the widely discussed matter of airframe icing".
They are looking at the experience and training of the crew, whether standard procedures were being followed and the issue of fatigue management.
Roger Cohen of the Regional Airline Association (the regional airlines' trade association) acknowledges that pilot fatigue is an issue but he insists it is an industry-wide problem that is not unique to the regional sector, and points to strict rules limiting pilot hours in the cockpit.
"They shouldn't be tired and that's the responsibility of anybody and the rules prevent you from being tired. Let me ask anybody else - should they come to their job tired? No they shouldn't, no-one should."
Regional airlines now operate half of all flights in America.
Their dramatic growth is in part due to the economy - as fewer passengers fly, smaller planes have become more economical.
But industry insiders have told the BBC that the regional airlines - in their rush to recruit extra staff - have hired pilots with drastically fewer flying hours.
Patrick Smith is a pilot for a major carrier and writes a weekly aviation column for Salon.com.
When he started out 20 years ago, he needed at least 1,500 flying hours to get a job at a regional airline.
Now, he says, it is common for pilots to be hired with 200-300 hours, which, he says, though legal is "astonishingly low".
And he explained that being a good pilot is about more than training.
"There's no good way to teach good judgement - only experience really can develop that," he says.
Safety programme
But federal officials are not just worried about low pay and inexperience.

“ Safety is not a luxury. I think that if it's good for the major carriers it needs to be good for the regional carriers ”
Robert Sumwalt NTSB board member

Robert Sumwalt, a member of the board of the NTSB, is concerned that regional carriers do not have robust enough systems in place to monitor the performance of their pilots:
"When you look at the safety programmes that some of the regional carriers have, compared to what most of the major carriers have, there is a difference."
For more than a decade, safety experts have been advocating that all the airlines implement a program called Flight Operational Quality Assurance (FOQA).
Using FOQA, airline companies can check up on how everyone involved in a flight is doing and - if mistakes are occurring - develop a training system to correct them.
Following an NTSB guideline issued two years ago, almost all of the major airlines adopted the programme. But to Robert Sumwalt's dismay, only three of America's 50 regional carriers have it in place.
"Safety is not a luxury," he says. "I think that if it's good for the major carriers it needs to be good for the regional carriers and I think that the travelling public is entitled to that and furthermore they deserve it."
But Roger Cohen points out that it is a complex programme to implement and the Regional Airline Association is trying hard to put it in place:
"We've got carriers that are doing it - more are doing it every day. If we were to do this interview next week, we'd probably have more. If we do it in a month, we'd have even more... We are following all the rules."
Patrick Smith says following the rules is not enough.
Through his online column, he regularly hears from regional pilots suffering from low morale:
"I see red flags. I see very low-time pilots in hi-tech airplanes in miserable or at least unsavoury working conditions. And something needs to be done about that before there is a legacy of crashes."
At this week's NTSB Buffalo crash hearing, the issues of pilot experience, fatigue and working conditions are expected to come to the fore. The question is: will discussion of these issues prompt change?