FSTargetDrone wrote:Broomstick wrote:If the thread stays open, and people are interested, I'd be more than happy to make some comments on the recent findings.
Can you speak to this business about "inexperience" on the part of the co-pilot, Shaw and how it may or may not have been a factor here (given the presence of a more experienced pilot being present)? How common is this situation with these sorts of flights?
I'll see what I can do, based on the articles linked and my somewhat limited knowledge of that arena of flight.
For starters, though - pairing a relatively more experienced pilot with a relatively less experienced one is nothing new, it's been done for close to a century now. "Captain", at least in US airlines, is based
solely on length of time at the airline in question. In the old days, when a pilot was hired or more less for life this meant the captain was the more experienced of the two (or three, or more) pilots on board. Nowadays, with people able and often forced to change employers, it is entirely possible to have a co-pilot/first officer with more total time and more time in type than the captain sitting next to him or her. That's probably why the trend is more and more towards
teamwork and to describing pilots as either "flying" or "non-flying" during a portion of the flight. Ideally, the two alternate roles - one does a take off while the other handles the radios, navigation, and other chores; then the next take off they switch roles. For a particularly difficult situation the more experienced pilot might take over or be handed the controls - one of the more famous incidents involved the
Gimli Glider affair, an Air Canada jet that ran out of fuel at tens of thousands of feet in altitude. One of the pilots aboard was acompetitive glider pilot and had MUCH more experience at handling unpowered aircraft than the other did, thus the pilot with gliding experience was the one at the controls. Remember, though -
no one is supposed to be in the cockpit of a passenger jet unless that person is
fully qualified for all operations of flight in that aircraft. On the first flight of the first day on the job a co-pilot should be and is expected to be able to fly that airplane safely all by his or her self should some sort of emergency arise.
Disclosures about the pilots' level of experience and issues of casual conversations during crucial times in the flight have raised questions about safety standards and the ability of airlines to monitor the training of their crews.
This is what you refer to, yes?
The pilot of Flight 3407, Capt. Marvin Renslow, 47, and his first officer, Rebecca Shaw, 24, of Maple Valley, talked about family, about other models of airplanes, about a Texas air traffic controller who liked to make jokes, and about their dislike of flying in the crowded and inclement Northeast.
Which is all fairly typical pilot chit-chat. During cruise flight this shouldn't be a problem. In fact, it can stave off boredom which is a problem on long flights. It is inappropriate during landing when pilots should have their full attention on flying. In fact, even at my level of flying, which has a lot less pressure and complication than the airlines, it is generally encouraged to stick to strictly business during the landing phase of flight. Myself, I tend to cut off the chit-chat during take off and landing and I'm far from the only casual pilot who does that. It just makes a lot of sense, you need to be focused when you're close to the ground. That doesn't mean an idle word will make the airplane fall out of the sky, but there are far too many cockpit voice recorder tapes that, just prior to all hell breaking loose, have the pilots talking about everything
but flying.
Then, noting ice accumulating on the windshield, she said she would not mind getting more experience in ice before becoming a captain. But they did not talk much about the procedures for flying in ice.
Yes, if you're flying passengers it's a good idea to get some real-world bad weather experience before stepping up to captain. If there's one advantage to learning to fly somewhere like the upper Midwest it's that you
will get experience with weather. Pilots from, say, Arizona or Florida must go out of their way to get such. I don't know where Shaw learned to fly or got most of her experience, but it's a safe bet it wasn't where I live.
Inexperience with ice and winter weather were believed to have been a contributing factor in the
Air Florida Flight 90 crash into the Potomac River in 1982
The icing conditions were far from severe on the night of Feb. 12, however, and the plane was minimally affected by it, a fact made clear on the first of three days of hearings here before the safety board.
Fact is, if you're flying in the Northeast, or around the Great Lakes - and Buffalo is overlapped by
both of those - you need to have experience with winter weather. Thus, pairing a pilot inexperienced with icing and knowing how to deal with it only in theory with a pilot who has actual experience with such conditions makes a great deal of sense. Usually. The less experienced pilot can take advantage of the other's real world experience and, ideally, gets some mentoring.
The crash occurred for a much simpler reason. According to documents released by the board, in a 27-second period while the pilots prepared their Bombardier Dash 8 Q400 for landing, they lowered the landing gear and cut the power.
Just in case it's not clear - lowering the landing gear increases drag, which decreases speed unless you add power.
The airspeed deteriorated from a comfortable 185 knots, or more than 200 miles an hour, to 131 knots, and when a warning system came on, the response by the captain was precisely the opposite of what it should have been. He pulled the nose of the turboprop up instead of pushing it down, leading to an aerodynamic stall, a condition in which the combination of speed and airplane angle reduces the flow of air over the wings so that they lose lift.
And that's where things start getting weird... this model of airplane not only physically shakes the controls in your hand when you approach a stall, as you get closer to a stall it will
push the nose down for you. Now, I've been told by a pilot with some experience in that type that the average human being is able to overpower the mechanism (necessary, in case it should ever accidentally deploy) but it's going to take some force to do so. You won't overpower the thing by accident or inadvertantly. You will have to seriously want to pull that stick back.
Their description of an aerodynamic stall in this article is slightly inaccurate - it is
solely the angle at which the airflow hits the wing that determines whether or not you are stalled. However, there is a relationship between airspeed and angle of attack, which often leads to some confusion and inaccurate statements. "Push the nose down" is the most common means of correcting a stall or near stall condition and for purposes of this discussion we needn't consider the exceptions.
During the preparations for landing, the discussion between the pilot and his first officer had wandered. After completing an extremely hurried pre-landing checklist, Capt. Renslow announced, "rock and roll."
>sigh< Yes, sometimes you get backed up and you have to hurry, but having to rush a checklist is not a good sign.
The final words heard on the recording were those of Shaw, who said, "We're ... " and then a scream.
It's pretty much consensus among the pilots I've talked to that the scream came when she realized they were doomed - it really is
just before the crash, probably with the ground and houses filling her view from the cockpit and the certain knowledge she and everyone aboard was really going to die very shortly.
In addition to violating a rule of the Federal Aviation Administration that forbids nonpertinent conversation when operating below 10,000 feet, the pilot and his first officer had also set themselves up for problems in the hours before they even arrived for work.
Yeah. You know, that no idle chit-chat below 10k feet is there for a
reason! That's why student pilots these days are taught the concept of "sterile cockpit" starting with
ground school, before they even get into an airplane.
Renslow had flown to Newark from his home in Florida the previous evening and had apparently slept in the crew lounge of Newark Liberty International Airport, a room not much different from a frequent-flier-club lounge. Pilots are warned that sleeping there can lead to dismissal.
And yet - apparently there is a history of pilots sleeping there
anyway...
As for Shaw, she had left her home in Maple Valley, and taken an evening flight in the cockpit of a FedEx cargo jet to Memphis, and in the middle of the night transferred to the cockpit of another plane bound for Newark.
Know how shitty you feel after a red-eye flight or two? Imagine taking
two of them in a row, then being expected to
actually fly an airplane after that. While I think what she did might have, technically, been legal it was still a stupid thing for her to do. However, the economics of being a first officer of a regional airline make this more common than people want to know.
According to board officials, at one point Colgan Air, which operated the flight to Buffalo for Continental, warned crew members who lived far from Newark, its base of operations, not to try to fly in on the same day a shift began.
Which sort of begs the question of why pilots live so far from their base of work, but that's a different issue.
Another issue is the pairing of two pilots with little experience. Renslow had only about 110 hours in the Dash 8, and Shaw fewer than 800 hours.
Well, you gotta get your flight time somewhere - people with more experience apply to the bigger airlines, it's in the regionals that you get that experience. That said, a total 800 hours is on the low side for these sorts of operations. In the past, I seem to recall hearing something about 1200 total hours being the minimum for regional airline hire, and a good percentage of that has to be multi-engine experience and such but I am not an authority on this. Even so, of the pilots I've known personally who applied to regional airlines they all had upwards of 1500 hours flight time - something that can be accumulated fairly easily through the training acquired by obtaining the necessary certifications plus a couple years teaching students or taking some other (admittedly very low-paying) flight job that doesn't involve passengers in the back prior to stepping up to passenger operations of this sort. If this is the case, Calgon really is hiring some
very low time pilots. That's not
necessarily a bad thing IF they're paired with pilots of significant experience. Apparently, though, they aren't - probably because by the time any of their pilots gets that experience they're off to a different employer.
Indeed, Renslow told Shaw as they descended that he had not seen as much ice build up on the wings in a long time, and that he had only 625 flying hours in the region.
Remember - Renslow lives in Florida where they don't get much winter weather.
Throughout the flight, Renslow appeared to take the role of a mentor, describing his training and providing Shaw with advice about her career options.
Which is an appropriate role for the more experienced pilot - provided this sort of discussion is not allowed to interfere with actually flying the damn airplane.
"I've never seen icing conditions," she said. "I've never de-iced. I've never seen any — I've never experienced any of that. I don't want to have to experience that and make those kinds of calls. You know, I'd've freaked out. I'd've, like, seen this much ice and thought oh my gosh, we were going to crash."
As a pilot from the Midwest my mind sort of boggles at this - never de-iced? Let me tell you about taking hours to clean the snow and frost off a small Cessna in January in Chicago.... Admittedly, airplane pilots use a different method than I do, but even many general aviation airports in my region will provide airline type deicing treatments to small airplanes on request (and for a price, of course). With the airplanes I fly if you see ice, or even frost, forming on the wings your only choice is really to get your ass on the ground as soon as possible - and, depending on circumstances, that might mean don't bother to take the time to get to an airport, land NOW, in the nearest spot that won't get you killed. For pilots from regions where they don't have to worry about this sort of thing icing involves fear of the unkown as well as things you really should be afraid of if you have any sense at all.
But if she doesn't want to "experience" that or "make those kinds of calls" what the fuck is she doing flying a passenger jet from Newark to Buffalo in FEBRUARY? Seriously - there's no way in hell you can fly airlines in the US as a career and NOT encounter that scenario. If that's you're attitude get another fucking career where you won't kill anyone.
OK, how common is this level of inexperience? Hard to say. I also want to emphasize that some regional airlines are much better than others, both in how they take care of their employees and how much they give a damn about safety.
As I said - the pilots I know personaly who merely
applied to airlines all had 2-3 times the experience of Shaw or Renslow when they were hired. Hell, I've known people with newly minted flight instructor certificates - one of the lowest level aviation jobs out there - with 2-3 times more experience than these two. That doesn't make Shaw and Renslow inherently bad pilots, but experience really does count in aviation. I think it's reasonable to question if they really had enough experience, and the right kind of experience, to do the job. I find it very troubling that these two, with apparently little to no experience with true winter/icing conditions, were flying a commuter route from Newark to Buffalo in winter through a region notorious for such weather, and in the case of Buffalo, notorious for icing conditions (it's Niagra falls as well as the proximity to the big lake - the falls throw a tremendous amount of moisture into the air in all seasons greatly increasing the risk of icing much of the year). While I don't think there's a legal minimum for "hours in actual icing conditions" someone flying passengers through that airspace needs more than just a theoretical knowledge of the phenomena. If the pilot in charge had had more actual experience in this sort of weather it might have made a different - and it was Renslow in charge, not Shaw. If Renslow had had his shit together Shaw's inexperience would have been irrelevant and, indeed, she might have learned something useful. Sure, it's nice to speculate that if Shaw had been a better pilot she would have noticed or said something that made a difference but the captain bears final responsibility and, in this case,
he was the one flying the airplane. His mistake killed 49 other people, not hers. The final blame rests with the captain, who apparently fucked up a simple stall recovery. I've been doing successful stall recoveries since my second hour of flight time, it's that basic a maneuver. Approach to landing stall in level fucking flight - that's a
fuck up. It's like if your brakes fail while going down the road and you decide the best solution to the problem is to swerve into on coming traffic. This was human error, folks, not mechanical failure or even the weather though certainly weather did contribute a smidgen. 50 people died because the jackass in the left front seat did
exactly the opposite of what he should have done. When I heard that I didn't think "inexperience" - hell, I've never been in a cockpit with a stick shaker but I know what the hell they are and what to do if the controls start vibrating in my hands - but
incompetence. Is that too harsh a word? No, I think not.
I think the captain was incompetent
