I'll start off with the NTSB's animation from the Flight 3407 crash in Buffalo. Things start to go really wrong around the 2:05 mark.




It is going to be hard for Colgan Air to justify this pairing in the cockpit. The Buffalo News has a pretty good article on the last part of the flight: http://www.buffalonews.com/home/story/668975.html

5/12/2009 11:11:59 PM

Nobody else post here, k?

5/12/2009 11:43:42 PM

Quote :

"A minute later, Renslow noted that he was hired by Colgan Air, which operated the flight, with just 625 hours of flying experience."

What's the norm?

5/13/2009 6:03:27 AM

From what I understand, regional carriers usually want somewhere between 500 and 1,000 hours. But the fact is that the regional pilots get paid crap salaries and have a high turn-over, so they may have just been trying to fill a seat. The problem is putting two people with such low experience in the same cockpit, one of which had busted 4 previous check-rides, doesn't strike me as prudent.

I know there are some airline pilots on TWW, so I'll let them comment further.

5/13/2009 8:32:37 AM

I a complete aviation junkie. I'm interested in anything that flies.

5/13/2009 11:20:12 AM

You're up at Redstone right?

5/13/2009 11:24:33 AM

What in the hell was wrong with this pilot? 600 hours or whatever he had (just barely skimmed the article) isn't that much, but by about his 5th flying lesson, he shouldn't known that pulling back hard on the yoke is the WORST thing he could've done in an airplane about to stall. If he'd just pushed forward, they probably would've been fine.

5/13/2009 5:54:51 PM

stall + yaw = spin

5/14/2009 1:38:34 AM

I saw that in the paper this morning. One of the first things that any pilot is taught is to nose down when the stall warning goes off. By the time that you solo it should almost be common sense.

5/14/2009 1:51:29 AM

Quote :

"Shaw reportedly made only $16,000 per year, and may have been unable to afford to live in the Newark area. Company records show that 93 of the Colgan’s 137 pilots reside outside of the greater New York area."

I happen to think this fact is very relevant.

PS: This, too:

Quote :

"Thirty years ago pilots were trained more about stalls--and recovery from stalls."

--Capt. Paul Rice, Airline Pilots Association

http://abcnews.go.com/Travel/story?id=7560379&page=1

Sometimes the old ways are the best ways. Sometimes.

[Edited on May 14, 2009 at 2:25 AM. Reason : .]

5/14/2009 2:05:30 AM

If you're entering a stall, is it standard to raise the flaps? Wouldn't the lowered flaps also change the amount that ailerons affected the flight too, making the plane a bit stabler?

[Edited on May 14, 2009 at 2:31 AM. Reason : ^Dad was talking about pilots should have been required to complete a stall recovery for their lic.]

5/14/2009 2:30:11 AM

/thread

If you know what this then you know how cool it is.

5/14/2009 2:45:03 AM

^ Pretty much everyone knows what that is.

Quote :

"Company records show that 93 of the Colgan’s 137 pilots reside outside of the greater New York area."

Sullenberger made a point of this during his testimony to congress after the Hudson ditching. Chances are, the commuter pilot moving you around is making less than your garbage collector. And yet, most airlines are still losing money.

Which begs the question, if commuter airlines are not a profitable business model, what can be done to fix that, or what could replace them?

5/14/2009 8:35:35 AM

Quote :

"If you're entering a stall, is it standard to raise the flaps?"

I wouldn't.

5/14/2009 9:24:59 AM

Well your stall speed is lower when you have your flaps down, but dropping the flaps is gonna make you slow down quickly. But yeah it is pretty much common sense to nose down when you hear the stall warning... even a basic student pilot knows to keep an eye on the airspeed and stay well away from stall speed.

Quote :

"Dad was talking about pilots should have been required to complete a stall recovery for their lic."

I had to recover from a power off and power on stall for my license... do you mean for like a type rating for a regional jet?


and yep, JCASHFAN, I am at Redstone.

[Edited on May 14, 2009 at 11:57 AM. Reason : ]

5/14/2009 11:57:03 AM

I've never stalled an airplane when I didn't intend to so I guess I have to give him the benefit of the doubt. However, it's incomprehensible to me how he pulled back with the shaker and stall indicator blaring

5/14/2009 1:09:58 PM

Quote :

"However, it's incomprehensible to me how he pulled back with the shaker and stall indicator blaring"

Go on the highway my son. Watch the failures. Compute.

Then consider that there's got to be the occasional pilot that slips through the cracks and sucks ass yet manages to still get certified. Kind of like the millions of drivers that somehow get licenses even though they have no ability to drive and have no understanding of the vehicle they operate or the physics involved in its operation.

Granted, it's much harder to get a pilot that far without ever teaching them anything because so much more is required of you in order to get the license and further ratings/endorsements.

They lost it big time. They had a small chance to add power but they didn't and they simultaneously drop the flaps as the aircraft reaches the stall speed, which probably slowed them enough to put it into a deep stall. They needed full power sooner, that was a bad situation. As I thought, the AP hid the problem from them for a second or two by automatically trimming out the aircraft to compensate for the lower efficiency of the wing. They weren't particularly experienced, so they somehow didn't pick up on the dramatic loss of airspeed and the impending stall. It could have been saved, but they sure as hell needed to act quickly. That video is no joke son, I can't imagine how scary that was for everyone on there.

My sons.

5/14/2009 1:40:16 PM

MAYBE HE HAD RHEE RHEE SON

HE WASN'T TUFF SON

5/14/2009 2:51:58 PM

jesus, those poor people. wow, that is not something i would want to be a part of.

5/14/2009 5:17:35 PM

Quote :

"it's incomprehensible to me how he pulled back with the shaker and stall indicator blaring"

A buddy of mine flies Embraers and said the stick pusher that activates during a stall is pretty stout, so (assuming Bombardier is similar) he had to be cranking back on the yoke.

I'm in the rotary-wing world, but I know we'd practice basics like this ad naseum. For two month's I did simulated engine failures or autorotations daily. I can't imagine actually screwing that up in real life as much as that has been drilled in my head. I'd like to think that was the same in the commuter airline community.


Of course, my same friend also said to never trust a pretty pilot. She may be good, but there is a good chance she got a pass by some check pilot trying to get in her pants. Ugly women? They can usually fly. Call it fucked up if you want, but he swears its true.

5/14/2009 7:30:27 PM

We have 2 female aviators in our squadron (well, one is in the squadron, the other got banished to the group HQ because she sucks so badly in the jet, but she still flies with us some).

One of them is heinously, awfully, terribly ugly, and fairly competent. The other is absolutely SMOKING hot...and completely incompetent (and will admit straight-up that she's used her looks to make it at times).

5/14/2009 8:51:03 PM

do it on the tarmac

5/14/2009 11:43:20 PM

In other news, one of the women running the ultra-marathon in Namibia this weekend was also the first woman to circumnavigate the globe in a helicopter.

What surprised me; she did it in a Robinson R44, which I'm not sure I'd want to fly around the world.

5/17/2009 10:16:36 AM

^How many times would that need to be serviced to circumnavigate the globe? I mean that can't have that long of a time between overhauls.

5/17/2009 11:28:13 AM

^^ at the Cherry Point airshow yesterday, there was a New Bern-based helo flight school with one of those. I talked to them about doing a helo license add-on, but found that they charge $265/hour, whether dual instruction or solo, and that after getting my license, there aren't really any helos to rent except for their school bird...again, at $265/hour.

5/17/2009 11:39:03 AM

NC Rotor and Wing has R22 and R44. I'm learning to fly the wing part now and wouldn't mind learning a rotor in the future. I like flying a lot, it's not as boring as I had thought (I've been skydiving now for 10 years which is generally constant excitement). Landing is a lot of fun too.

Jesus that animation is a clusterfuck, I can't imagine what the passengers felt.

[Edited on May 17, 2009 at 11:56 AM. Reason : a]

5/17/2009 11:43:56 AM

P-8A: When the Airplane you're flying is OLD and BUSTED ignore it, and wait on the new one!!

5/17/2009 2:10:09 PM

Do you guys think that commercial airplane crash survival rates will always be basically 0 like they are now, or will they finally figure out a way to improve survival rates like they do for some smaller single engine planes like deploy a parachute if installed?

5/17/2009 2:29:30 PM

Quote :

"there aren't really any helos to rent except for their school bird...again, at $265/hour"

Helicopters are expensive to rent / operate. The reason Robinsons are so cheap is the fact that they're piston driven, instead of jet. When you start talking something like a Bell 206 you're running in the neighborhood of $1000 / hour.

Quote :

"Jesus that animation is a clusterfuck, I can't imagine what the passengers felt. "

Like they were going to die. Yeah, that wasn't a last minute, what just happened?

5/17/2009 2:32:56 PM

^^

Airplane crashes happen, most of the times I've seen, in situations where parachutes wouldn't make a difference. Close to the ground turning onto final or the like. Adding the extra complexity of a parachute would probably increase the accident rate.

5/17/2009 6:37:49 PM

Flew on a Colgan q400 this weekend RDU->Newark. My wife was scared as hell.

5/18/2009 12:38:34 AM

^x7 Video from the 2009 MCAS Cherry Point Air Show:

http://tinyurl.com/ownuha

I was born in New Bern. We used to go to Cherry Point almost every time they had a show.

I don't want to mislead you, though. I am fascinated with aircraft and flight in general, but I don't fly--I gave it up completely when I left the Army in 1989.

5/18/2009 4:16:32 AM

Quote :

"I don't fly--I gave it up completely when I left the Army in 1989."

5/18/2009 11:30:43 AM

^ Um. . .SO TUFF?

Why was that ?

5/18/2009 11:55:17 AM

So anyway, I was flyin dat Bombardier CRJ 700 the other day son. Goin from KIAH to KCLT and cruising at 29,000 feet son. Flight Sim X son, filled with some beautiful glitches my sons, beautiful glitches.

Dem free shaft turbines are da heat btw son.

5/18/2009 11:58:47 AM

didnt the pilot like fail his last few check rides or something. He had no place in the cockpit if he was deemed unfit

5/18/2009 1:22:24 PM

As someone who flies Bombardiers for shit pay , and has three friends at Colgan, I'll throw in my two cents.

First I just want to clarify that the captain did not have 625 hours at the time of the accident. ATP requirements (for captaincy of a 121 airline) requires at minimum 1,500 hours. He likely had twice that, but I digress.

The Duke already put it simply. I'll just elaborate on how badly they fucked up from evidence in the video.

The problems start when the gear is lowered and the condition levers are increased. No power is added to counteract the drag, and consequently the airspeed dwindles. Somehow, both of them do not notice the airspeed dropping towards the low speed cue. The captain calls for flaps 15 with the speed already bordering stall speed. Impending stall: the stick shaker kicks into action. The captain pulls back on the yoke and adds power when he should have set max thrust and, if anything, pushed forward on the yoke to reduce the angle of attack. Now with an increasing angle of attack and the aircraft stalling, he slams on the right rudder aggravating the stall, almost spinning the thing. ALL THE WHILE STILL PULLING BACK ON THE YOKE?!?!?!??! I used to do that for fun in a Cessna to see how long I could keep the thing in a stall. The first officer puts the flaps up, which should never be done until stall recovery at a designated speed, which is above V2. She does it at about 82 knots, which sort of makes it a moot point, since I don't think that at that time the condition was recoverable.

I mean from the outside it looks like a whack job. Who knows what they may have thought in the cockpit. We'll never know that much. I fly a jet so I can't comment too much on their aircraft specific procedures, but for what it's worth I didn't even know you could combat the stick pusher on my Bombardier CR9.

5/19/2009 12:10:46 AM

^ Yes, I agree with this evaluation of the situation. It seems to me that they didn't notice the airspeed going down because the Autopilot was handling shit. Not that this is an excuse, but I mean they were obviously preoccupied with some other task or something. I believe that if they had been flying the aircraft manually, they'd have immediately noticed that they were having to pull back more and more on the yoke in order to maintain the same altitude and they would have most likely added power.

It's hard to watch them drop a few more degrees of flaps right as the aircraft is on the verge of stalling. Of course, they again fail to add any more power. The rudder application you pointed out was very interesting indeed. I guess they'd never done any aerobatics or spin training before, and even so, most pilots are aware that applying very much rudder during a stall is simply inviting a spin. It seems to me that they managed to put the aircraft into a spin for at least 1/2 of a rotation and that was the end of it really. Perhaps better pilots could have managed to recover, but in all honestly, better pilots probably wouldn't have put the aircraft in that situation to begin with.

I'm still amazed that nobody added power as they kept increasing drag by extending the gear and flaps. It seems like such a simple concept for two people who has already made it that far in their aviation career. It seems that two very low quality pilots (Perhaps due to low intelligence, poor training or both) were at the controls on this flight.

5/19/2009 9:44:48 AM

The Dash doesn't have an autothrottle, so even with the autopilot on, they should have been vigilant of airspeed/power settings, especially during a configuration change, but you may have a point about noticing having to substitute pitch correction for dwindling airspeed with the autopilot off. Maybe the captain was falling asleep. Maybe he was checking out the first officer's rack. There must have been some external factor in play, which still doesn't explain to me their attempt at stall recovery. If this guy failed multiple 121 proficiency checks he probably shouldn't have still been at the airlines, much less awarded the captain seat.

5/19/2009 12:12:08 PM

Hey Duke you were at Cherry Point Saturday? Wish I had known that. I got some pretty nice pics at the show. Uploading them now.

5/19/2009 12:45:47 PM

My new ride...



[Edited on May 19, 2009 at 2:34 PM. Reason : .]

5/19/2009 2:34:18 PM

Nice son...

Nice.

5/19/2009 2:48:50 PM

Just wanted to say hey to the thread. Still down here in Savannah flying around on Gulfstream's!

5/19/2009 3:22:58 PM

I'll post my two cents. I have no doubt both of these pilots knew how to recover from a stall. I simply dont believe that both of them didnt have to recover from power on/off stalls in their traning at multiple points.

From what I thought I remember from reading the news, they were in IFR conditions. There are numerous things that could have happened that put them in a state of panic to do things they were trained not to do. They probably were both in a disoriented state on approach in the soap and simply didnt react correctly or quickly enough.

I think emergency situations are best handled by military pilots (neither of these were). They train to react on muscle memory and checklists they have put to memory and recite as soon as someone wakes them up from sleep. This type of training isnt stressed in the civilian world, and can really lead to problems if you have to make the correct decision in the first 5 seconds of a problem to give you a shot to survive.

For example, if you lost an engine on take-off, I can promise you a military pilot with 200 hours in the left seat will handle it better in most cases than a seasoned pilot with many more hours. Just a different type of training for emergency situations.

Im not saying there are exceptions to the rule, but I think my theory would hold up quite well in practice or statistics.

Im not a military pilot, but my boss was and we talked a lot about it. Duke can correct me if he thinks otherwise.

[Edited on May 19, 2009 at 4:27 PM. Reason : .]

5/19/2009 4:23:48 PM

Quote :

"Hey Duke you were at Cherry Point Saturday? Wish I had known that. I got some pretty nice pics at the show. Uploading them now. "

Yep, I was there. My squadron provided the Prowler demo (I managed to dodge getting tasked with being in that crew, so I just went on my own time to hang out and check things out).

Quote :

"I think emergency situations are best handled by military pilots (neither of these were). They train to react on muscle memory and checklists they have put to memory and recite as soon as someone wakes them up from sleep. This type of training isnt stressed in the civilian world, and can really lead to problems if you have to make the correct decision in the first 5 seconds of a problem to give you a shot to survive. For example, if you lost an engine on take-off, I can promise you a military pilot with 200 hours in the left seat will handle it better in most cases than a seasoned pilot with many more hours. Just a different type of training for emergency situations. Im not saying there are exceptions to the rule, but I think my theory would hold up quite well in practice or statistics. Im not a military pilot, but my boss was and we talked a lot about it. Duke can correct me if he thinks otherwise. "

Yeah, the extent of my civil flying is in light, simple stuff like 152/172s (I've flown some other stuff as a guest...J-3 Cubs, RV-4, King Air, etc, but no significant time in any of them). There aren't really any memory items for airplanes like that. I mean, if you lose an engine, I'd immediately zoom for altitude, then set best glide, then start checking switches and trying to restart it, making a mayday call, and looking for an open field...but there aren't really any emergency procedures.

Military aircraft are another story. I have experience in five of them, now (T-6, T-1, T-39, T-2, and EA-6), and they all probably have from about 20-45 "boldface" emergency procedures (EPs). In the emergency checklists, certain steps are listed in bold, as they are expected to be accomplished immediately from memory before you even take the time to pull the checklist out. Some of them are a single step; some of them are 10-12 steps long. Not only do you have to be able to write them or recite them from memory without hesitation, you have to be able to do it verbatim. The Air Force (as opposed to the generally somewhat more "cowboyish" Navy/USMC is even more Nazi-ish...they will hammer you on punctuation/capitalization!)

Starting in flight school, learning these procedures cold is the first thing you do when you learn a new airplane. You fill out a boldface EP exam once per month. The only passing score is 100% (and failing can have severe consequences...failing a boldface exam is treated like failing a flight, and it only takes a few failures to attrite you from flight school).

In the fleet, you still do a boldface exam once per month (although it's a little more gentlemanly...nobody is watching you--you can pull out the checklist and doublecheck something if you need to, but we all generally do it from memory and just doublecheck everything before turning it in). You also do a yearly open book and closed book aircraft systems exam, along with a check flight. Finally, at least in my squadron, we do a monthly simulator that is exclusively dedicated to emergencies (and they'll throw all kinds of crazy compound emergencies at you...you might find yourself single-engine, with an electrical failure, almost out of gas, in IMC conditions, with landing gear or flaps that won't come down, etc).

...and one more thing--even on the most benign sortie, we always brief the plan for the flight in detail and brief what we'll do in certain emergency scenarios...every single time. I don't think many civilian aviators do the same sort of preparation.

5/19/2009 7:17:37 PM

Anyone know where to fly an RV4 or 8 local?

5/19/2009 8:42:11 PM

can an experimental be in commercial service? you might just have to know someone.

my roommate is buying an RV-6 in 2 weeks, though. I flew an RV-4 once...it was sweet.

5/19/2009 8:55:06 PM

[Edited on May 19, 2009 at 10:54 PM. Reason : ]

5/19/2009 10:49:59 PM

any other AF pilots here?

5/19/2009 11:04:29 PM

Quote :

"From what I thought I remember from reading the news, they were in IFR conditions."

Night VMC according to the NTSB was what I thought I heard. So, it sounds like they had a visible horizon.

Quote :

"can an experimental be in commercial service?"

Pretty sure the answer to this is no.

Quote :

"Starting in flight school, learning these procedures cold is the first thing you do when you learn a new airplane. You fill out a boldface EP exam once per month. The only passing score is 100% (and failing can have severe consequences...failing a boldface exam is treated like failing a flight, and it only takes a few failures to attrite you from flight school)."

Not knowing an aircraft limit or emergency procedure will bust you with a quickness on check rides.

5/20/2009 12:22:03 AM