Whistlin' Dan
Well-known member
- Joined
- May 18, 2006
- Posts
- 460
That makes for good press, but it's not as relevent to the real causes of the crash as the general public might think. We don't know who did the check-rides, or what (if anything) the reasons for the failures were. There really is no "standard of accountability" in most flight standards departments. Standards of performance, yes, but of accountability, NO.The news channels are starting to bash the captain of the Colgan crash. Apparently he failed 5 checkrides in his life. The implication is that he should have had his lively hood taken away from him. They don't point out that he must have passed the checkride on the next time through.
Who checks the "checkers?"
There's not a space shuttle pilot out there whose training history is unblemished - a history of absolute, 100%, first-time demonstration of mastery of the skills and tasks necessary to fly an orbital mission. Yet, when one of those things blows apart, we don't see CNN saying that "Commander Scobee had to re-accomplish this-or-that task when in space shuttle training several years before the doomed mission" Nor do you have to look very far to find CNN's own screw-ups, they're all over YouTube.
Likewise, I'm pretty sure that the WSJ has had to publish more than 5 corrections or retractions in the time that the Colgan pilot had been active in aviation, but you won't see them trumpeted on their front pages.
We don't know who did this guys training, what training was accomplished, or what standards were applied. Let's cut him some slack until all the facts are in. And I doubt all the facts will ever be "in."
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