A current and qualified Captain made a fatal mistake. A mistake that we train to recognize and correct almost from our first lesson in an airplane.


The question we should be asking is how could he have made this basic error?


Five busts over a career - sounds pretty damning to an uninformed observer. But we all know that he had passed his last 6 PCs. We also know anyone can bust any ride, any time - no one can expect every ride to be perfect. And he was obviously current at the time of the accident.


So maybe his training itself was somehow flawed. Maybe he never understood the purpose of the pusher. Maybe he was simply trying to maintain back pressure to maintain angle of attack assuming the stall was imminent and not fully developed. But it seems unlikely he would have purposefully maintained that force throughout the stall.


Maybe he was fatigued. Maybe he was exhausted. Maybe it degraded his perceptions and reactions. So he could not recognize the decay of airspeed. So he did not react to the stick shaker and pusher properly. So he was late in adding full power.


Maybe he didn't recognized his fatigue before he left. Maybe he did, but felt pressure, real or imagined, to complete the mission for the sake of his job that day or for the sake of future references from his chief pilot. Maybe he felt financial pressure to complete the mission to get paid for the trip. Maybe he had debt built up from flight school. Maybe he took out loans to make ends meet as a First Officer. He was a family man, and pay at Colgan, even as Captain, isn't going to put a new minivan in the driveway for his wife, braces on his kids, or send them to even the lousiest state university. Maybe those financial concerns caused the kind of long term stress that dulls the senses and diminishes performance.


Maybe he was thinking about the pressures of being away from home for more than half of his childrens' lives. Maybe he was worried about not being there for the recitals, soccer games, birthdays, holidays, weekends, and every other special event in his family's future. Maybe he was worried about how that would affect his children. Maybe he was concerned about the stresses he was placing on his marriage, the effect his protracted absences placed on his wife. Maybe those thoughts, or something similar, were going through his mind when he should have noticed his airspeed bleeding away.



I reject the idea that the Captain was somehow not competent for the mission. I reject the idea that he was inadequately trained. I reject the idea that he was not experienced enough to be at the controls that night.


And I absolutely reject the idea that "Compensation has nothing to do with safety."