Pinnacle Pilots: "Just wanted to have fun"

[Diesel]

Just because you are at max cert alt in a plane doesn't mean you can get up there every time.

A couple examples. The Citation 750 is certified to FL510. Will it get up there? Sure but you better be **CENSORED****CENSORED****CENSORED****CENSORED** light and fly it fast and climb slow. You can get there. I've been to 490 and you better make sure the plane will want to get there.

The king air 90 series were certified to 310. How they got them up there I will never know. Probably with jato bottles or something like that because they will never make it.

Just because a plane is certified doesn't mean it will get there. It is flown with test pilots, a green airplane and new engines. Not some RJ that is all bent to shiat and is not flown as the profile to the altitude.

So yes you can sevice ceiling but there isn't much room for error.

 

[DirkkDiggler]

Lear70, Thanks for the informative post. Nicely objective and that is certainly refreshing.

 

[flap operator]

Lear - nicely put.



FO

 

[exchexflyer]

Lear70, I agree with everything you said. Thanks for saying what I couldn't have put into words!

 

[CRJ puppy]

Lear70's post is almost right on with the exception of the fact that the double engine failure memory items were not completed correctly. While the thrust levers were moved to the idle position, there is no indication that they were moved to the SHUTOFF position to stop the fuel flow. Therefore they still had fuel flow to the engines with the continuous ignition on, resulting in the melting of the various turbine vanes in both the HPT and the LPT (in the #2 engine). (Varying from 30% to 70% of the metal melted away...reference the Chairman's Powerplant report.) The #2 engine was doomed never to relight at this point, long before they ever began to initiate a windmill restart. This is why they never got N2 rotation on the #2 engine (unfortunately).

 

[psycho]

Hey Gateau,
********

Another unhappy reader of Gateau. Unfortunately, he went a bit too far...

 

[BLing]

One of my coworkers said it best: hopefully this will cause enough of a shakeup to get the company to implement a REAL training program, hire QUALIFIED individuals by paying enough to attract them, and hopefully this loss of life will educate enough people to one day prevent another such tragedy with even greater loss of life.

Cannot agree with you more. Pinnacle needs to solve this problem by setting higher standards for who they hire at all levels. They can do this by paying people better and actually offering benefits. The training programs are in need of a major overhaul as well. Not to say that Pinnacle doesnt have good people working for them, because they have a lot, but they have been forced to hire some people that may not have been able to get jobs elsewhere. I am not in anyway bashing this crew, I did not personally know them, nor have I read any reports, but there are lessons to be learned from this tragedy.

 

[Flechas]

Of course he went too far, Gateau is Rhoid, he can't help but get banned. (i'm drunk right now, not too far from getting banned myself...)

 

[JD2003]

Core Lock? Thats pretty spooky. I thought the EMB had its share of spookiness until I heard this bit about core lock.

Did the previous poster meen to suggest that there was ignition and fuel flow with the thrust levers at idle during the restart sequence? Seems to me that fuel flow is introduced after a certain N1 has been achieved but that's just the EMB...don't know about the CRJ.

spooky indeed...but heck, I still love airplanes.

pilot error?...foolishness...yes!!!

engineering shortfall...this I like!


Oh god...I could have been a doctor or a lawyer...what was I thinking?

 

[Lear70]

Lear70's post is almost right on with the exception of the fact that the double engine failure memory items were not completed correctly. While the thrust levers were moved to the idle position, there is no indication that they were moved to the SHUTOFF position to stop the fuel flow.

Strange... I must have missed that part. In the CVR transcript PC does the memory items and says they're shut off, then later when doing the engine relight, he talks again about them being shutoff.

Did he get his verbiage wrong because he was rattled and only move them to idle but said "shutoff"? During the initial briefing (very beginning of the hearing) the synopsis says they did the restart attempts but makes no mention that they were done incorrectly - something I believe would be important in the hearing.

I'll have to review the transcripts a little better and see what I missed. Thanks for the clarification.

Regarding core lock... we'll hear more about that today from the G.E. engineers' testimonies. Some of our more experienced pilots (guys with 15 to 20k hours) seem to have heard about it before; it's a new one for me so I'm all ears...