New WSJ article on awful Pilot Pay in Colgan crash

[BrickTop]

I disagree, nothing in the dialogue made it appear they thought it was Tail Stall.

No, but why else would they have raised the flaps and the gear? We can speculate all we like. Just personally If I had discussed icing and entered a stall I may very well have reacted exactly the same way. It would be very difficult without any buffeting from an impending tail stall to segregate which stall in fact was happening.

 

[eaglesview]

An idiotic and completely unfair generalization, and valid only if "acme/walmart" crews were all alike, AND the only ones in history ever to do something stupid. Enjoy your scary commute.

No completeley fair. First off I didn't call the crews acme/walmart, I called certain regionals as having an acme/walmart attitude toward operating an airline and in their hiring practices. If you do not think that is true pull your head out of the sand and look around.

Do you really think MESA and Eagle (as an example) have the same hiring standards.Better yet you think MESA and AMR (eagle) have equal training departments and standards..Get real.

 

[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

 

[flynryan15]

No completeley fair. First off I didn't call the crews acme/walmart, I called certain regionals as having an acme/walmart attitude toward operating an airline and in their hiring practices. If you do not think that is true pull your head out of the sand and look around.

Do you really think MESA and Eagle (as an example) have the same hiring standards.Better yet you think MESA and AMR (eagle) have equal training departments and standards..Get real.

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!

 

[Lear70]

No, but why else would they have raised the flaps and the gear? We can speculate all we like. Just personally If I had discussed icing and entered a stall I may very well have reacted exactly the same way. It would be very difficult without any buffeting from an impending tail stall to segregate which stall in fact was happening.

You mean besides the fact that:

a. The airspeed was WAY down into the red tape
b. The shaker was going off
c. The pusher was going off

d. NONE OF THOSE HAPPEN IN A TAIL STALL!!

The way the tail's airfoil is shaped, it will only stall at airspeeds WELL BELOW where the wing stalls. Therefore, the only way a tail stall can happen BEFORE the wing stalls is if the tail accretes ice, prematurely separating airflow and stalling the tail.

IF that happens, the tail will stall at airspeeds well ABOVE the shaker, nudger, or pusher - that's why the danger exists - there's NO indication of it except for a "mushing out of the controls", lightening of up-pitch control column forces, and finally an UPWARD pitch movement of the aircraft.

If you're in the red tape, the shaker actuates, or the pusher actuates, it's not a tail stall, it's a wing stall. Basic icing training should have covered that simple fact. If that's what he was thinking, then he wasn't paying attention in the icing class.

It also appears that SHE was the one who raised the flaps. He never commanded them, and the CVR records her as saying "I got the flaps up, you want the gear?" If I was a betting man, I'd say she didn't see the unusual attitude, but DID see the airspeed increasing and yanked the flaps, thinking they were recovering. Bad news is that they were still well into the tape, wasn't NEAR time yet, the unusual attitude notwithstanding.

We'll never know what either of them was thinking, just have to learn what lessons we can and apply them going forward.

 

[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.