Colgan says it is no longer hiring inexperienced pilots

[RamboLiberal]

Source: Buffalo News

Colgan Air has revised its pilot hiring standards in a way that would have disqualified someone as inexperienced as the pilot of the doomed Flight 3407, the company said today as hearings into the Feb. 12 crash turned to the company's hiring and employment practices.

In addition, testimony revealed that the copilot of Flight 3407 — which crashed into a home in Clarence, killing 50 — had a gross annual salary of about $16,254 a year.

The second day of National Transportation Safety Board hearings in the crash moved the focus away from the pilot, Capt. Marvin Renslow, and toward Colgan, the Continental Airlines subcontractor that operated Flight 3407.

Under questioning from investigators, Mary Finnegan, Colgan's vice president for administration, acknowledged that when Renslow was hired, the minimum number of flight hours to be considered for hiring was 600 hours.

Since the Clarence crash, Colgan has boosted its minimum flying requirement for new pilots to 1,000 hours, Finnegan acknowledged.


Read more: http://www.buffalonews.com/home/story/670165.html

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Shameful that a Colgan First Officer had a salary equivalent to a fast food worker! If I can I avoid commuter airlines. The majors worry me enough with all the cost-cutting.

[47of74]

1. We need real airline reform laws with teeth in them

We need laws that children of airline executives will call "the reason daddy (or mommy) went to prison" if said airline executive don't keep their noses so clean that you could eat off them.

[mn9driver]

2. Every regional airline is like this.

The idea that they are going to "raise their standards" is ridiculous. Brand new pilots come out of the puppy mills with well over $100,000 dollars in debt. So, now they need to find another 400 hours of experience before they can take that $16,000 per year job?

Riiight. This is nonsense and Colgan and the rest of them know it. The only reason that Colgan is making this claim is because they know that if they do need to hire someone, there is a pool of desperate, laid off pilots right now. But that won't last forever. The pool of new pilots lining up for $16000 jobs is rapidly drying up.

Automation has made it possible to put very inexperienced pilots in the front of these airplanes, and as long as everything stays in the envelope, they do just fine.....but as soon as they are put in an "outside the envelope" situation, the outcome is a total crapshoot. The first officer on this flight was amazed by the ice building up on the airplane--SHE HAD NEVER SEEN IT BEFORE!! There is something very, very wrong with that. As the airplane stalled, she took it on herself to raise the flaps in an attempt to help, and basically made it more difficult to recover even if the captain was doing the right thing--which he apparently wasn't...

I am so mad I could spit. We saw a preview of this tragedy a few years ago when a Pinnacle CRJ with only the pilots on board fell out of the sky from 41000 feet. They should never have taken the airplane up there, but neither one had ever been above 40000 and they wanted to "have the experience" They were so inexperienced that they didn't know the risk they were taking. Long story short: 15 minutes of CVR transcripts as these two poor puppies did EVERYTHING wrong when they got "out of the envelope", and eventually crashed and died.

This will happen again, folks. Automation can't fix everything. And 600 or 1000 hours is NOT adequate experience for flying these things. You get what you pay for. </rant>

[RamboLiberal]

3. I see you are from Minnesota and have a Wellstone avatar

I don't know if you buy in to the tinfoil hat on the Wellstone flight - I don't. But I think there is certainly a parallel here to pilot experience and fatigue in the Wellstone crash.

The latest issue coming to light regarding the fatal September 25 crash of a King Air A-100 carrying Minnesota Senator Paul Wellstone is the possibility that the captain flying Wellstone's chartered King Air had flown the aircraft after working the night shift at his nursing job. The work schedule of pilot Richard Conry in the days before the crash -- and how it may have affected his fitness to fly -- are now part of the NTSB's crash investigation. The 55-year-old pilot's four-hour nursing shift at a Twin Cities hospital -- previously undisclosed -- ended between 9 and 10 p.m. the night before the crash. The fatal flight took off at 9:20 the next morning. Federal regulations require that charter companies provide at least 10 hours off duty between flights, however, the regulations don't prevent pilots from working a non-aviation job. So, it wouldn't be illegal for a pilot to work a second job, even if the work is within 10 hours of a takeoff.
http://www.avweb.com/avwebflash/briefs/181745-1.html

The captain of Sen. Paul Wellstone's fatal flight to Eveleth was so concerned about the weather that he briefly canceled the trip before deciding to go ahead with it, according to new information from crash investigators.

Three days earlier, the same pilot accidentally endangered Wellstone by flipping the wrong switch on a takeoff from St. Paul. That mistake by Capt. Richard Conry was corrected by his copilot after the plane pitched downward while trying to gain altitude just 300 feet off the ground.

"Oh, that could have been pretty bad," Conry reportedly told the copilot.

When the plane landed safely in Rochester, Wellstone jokingly told Conry to "get some sleep," the report said. Conry's copilot on that flight later suggested to Conry that he should consider retiring.

Those findings were among many facts released without comment Friday by the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB), which won't rule on the cause of the crash for months.

But Friday's report sheds new light on the backgrounds of the two pilots and on Conry's anxiety about weather conditions before the fatal Oct. 25 flight, which included light to moderate icing, low cloud ceilings and low visibilities in northeastern Minnesota.

http://www.startribune.com/politics/11758266.html

[mn9driver]

4. I agree.

The Wellstone tragedy was pilot error from everything I know about it. The standards for the pilots that fly charters like that are considerably lower than even regional airline standards.

There is a horrifying NTSB animation of the Colgan crash, where you can see the frantic and incorrect control inputs and the aircraft's reaction to them:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lxywEE1kK6I

[LuckyLib]

6. Right you are. And the American people are getting their cheap seats.

My commercial pilot friends in their 50's are appalled at the low number of hours required by the commuter airlines now, and because the captains move out to the majors relatively quickly, they join the majors with far less hours than their predecessors.

These young guys and women need lots of time with lots of equipment in different kinds of weather. My hubby says you don't take the red-eye as your commute through two airports to get to your base and begin flying on your exhaustion. Basic common sense. This duo was underprepared, unfamiliar with icing conditions, and incapable of handling that airplane in a crisis situation. Others could have done it.

[santamargarita]

5. So, they're going to get a high-time pilot for $15,000?

Not anyone I know!