Originally Posted by PipeMan

Been thinking about this tragedy for a while and what to say. There is no doubt in my mind that Piedmont and to a larger extent, AA, have blood on their hands. This is the result of poor training, lack of oversight, and **** poor pay and working conditions. All the tough talk about D:0 or whatever the fancy metric they're focused on this month promotes a rushed environment prone to errors. The terrible pay results in high turnover and a management team that's largely inexperienced with little mentoring ability. Doesn't help that all the airlines used that sweet bailout money to throw early retirement at the old timers who have been around the block and see what happens when sh*t hits the fan. This is a major advantage that young pilots have when coming up. But again, you need to pay a lot to the older guys to stick around. If you pay $12/hr. to someone to work outside in all weather conditions, you shouldn’t expect them to care much about the operation.

I have been to this station many times, along with many others in AA's regional system, and to be honest, it is a miracle this doesn't happen more often. You always felt that "pressure" in the air to keep the plane moving, keep the bags loading, get the new crew on, etc. For those who did this type of flying, you know what I’m talking about. And all stations are the same, just with different faces.

I don't only blame that ground handling side either. The CPO's at the AA regionals have blood on their hands too. All those emails to captains asking why this such flight was 2 minutes late closing the door further promotes the rushing culture to the one person who has the ability to stop everything when things aren't right. Making captains have this worry in back of their head is, in my view, a disgrace. But just another example of **** poor mentoring and ability to lead from above. Same with Middle Management in other departments that all get their marching orders from above and push it down to station management.

I have seen what a toxic person or attitude can do to a smaller business. It is a cancer that you cannot let spread. When it is at a faceless corporation like AA/Piedmont where ALL higher ups push it downward, the spread is unstoppable, and it leads to a tragedy like this. In my experience, hiring and retaining solid talent to work is very hard. Talk is cheap. If you treat your people like family and treat them like a PROFFESIONAL, you will get a higher caliber individual who takes pride in their work and look out for each other like brothers. You'll retain management who want to mentor young workers and to make sure something like this would never happen, but a global airline just does not operate the same way because of greed.

I am sure the investigators will do their job and get a better idea of what happened. Just a terrible tragedy that was 100% preventable.