Originally Posted by shfo

How do you know he would have just instructed till 1500 hours? What if he didn't have what it takes to become a CFI. After all the training, ratings and certificates I have, the hardest was my initial CFI. He may have given up and gone back to his old career. I know many people who have become CFIs and got burnt out in the industry and switched careers. He may have become a CFI and gone out and gotten himself and a student killed. He may have become a great CFI and built up his basic airmenship and the whole situation would not have happened.

Originally Posted by shfo

I don't think there is one cure all to solve this problem but 1500 hours is a good start. To have quality hours you also need some quantity.

Originally Posted by shfo

On the training side, I think there is much to be done. First of all, with a new airplane at an airline there is an extensive process the airline has to go through to get the aircraft certified to fly passengers. Because of economical restraints, ie being a cheap airline, the people that made critical decisions for the Q400 program probably weren't as good as the people who made the decisions at an airline like Horizon. I have gone through a lot of the information available on the NTSB's website and am not too impressed with some of the things I've seen. For instance, the POI failed training on the aircraft.

One of the factors I believe may have contributed to the crash is Colgan's normal landing profile. http://www.ntsb.gov/dockets/aviation...027/417476.pdf It says you shall be configured and done with checklists before the final approach fix. This to me shows that they wanted to be very conservative on flying the new aircraft but I think it may have had a large factor in the crash. At 22:16:07 the gear comes down at 176 knots. The profile calls for doing the landing flow after the gear comes down. I haven't found the "flows" on the NTSB site but by reading the CVR and checklist it looks like chiming the FAs, setting the props forward and setting the bleeds and standby pumps on. I don't know the Q 400 that well I've only jumpsat on it a couple of times but I would assume that the pilot doing the flow would be too wrapped up in doing the flow to pay much attention at what is going on with the airplane. While the FO was doing the flow the airspeed went from 176 kts to 140 kts. The airplane was straight and level while she was doing the flow. I believe this is the grave mistake. There is no reason to be fully configured in straight and level flight before the outer marker. The airspeed dropped 36 knots in 16 seconds with the gear and condition levers being moved. At 22:16:23 He calls for flaps 15 landing checklist at 140 kts. The FO now just finished with her flow selects flaps 15 and has her head buried in an 8 1/2 by 11 checklist, 3 seconds later the shaker went off and no recovery was made. So while a big configuration change was made in straight and level flight there was really only one pilot because the other one was busy doing flows and checklists. They could have easily done 170-180 to the marker dropped the gear over Klump done the flow set flaps 15 and been on speed by 1000'. After passing 1000 feet the FO could have then gone through the before landing checklist. It appears that the people who came up with the profiles were either afraid of the airplane, didn't know the capabilities of it or were just way too conservative. They also didn't have much real world experience to think they could go into EWR and be doing 120 kts outside the Marker while going in. This is something the FAA needs to be looking into instead of just approving an AOM/FOM without reading the contents.