Federal regulators should review the role played by regional airlines that carry travelers for major carriers, the chairman of the National Transportation Safety Board said.
The link between airlines such as Comair and Air Wisconsin Airlines Corp. and carriers including
Delta Air Lines Inc. and
United Continental Holdings Inc. “can be confusing,”
Deborah Hersman said at a hearing in Washington today. “We need to know more, and the public needs to know more.”
Safety practices at regional carriers, which account for about half of all scheduled U.S. passenger flights, have drawn scrutiny after incidents such as the crash of a
Pinnacle Airlines Corp. Colgan flight last year near Buffalo, New York, that killed 50 people.
Colgan operated the flight on behalf of Continental Airlines. Passengers may check in at a major carrier’s ticket counter and see that airline’s name on the plane, only to learn after boarding that it’s being flown by a regional carrier, Hersman said.
The NTSB is holding the two-day hearing to learn what the airline industry and regulators are doing to ensure “all carriers” are held to high safety standards, Hersman said.
Regional carriers have been involved in the last six commercial airline accidents with fatalities on board, the Transportation Department’s inspector general,
Calvin Scovel, said in
testimony in June 2009.
Pilot Errors
The NTSB said in February that Captain Marvin Renslow of Colgan caused his plane to crash near Buffalo by incorrectly responding to a cockpit stall warning. He died along with everyone on board, plus one person on the ground.
In addition to the Colgan accident, a regional jet flown by Delta’s Comair unit crashed in 2006 in Lexington, Kentucky, killing 49. The pilots erred in choosing a runway too short for a safe takeoff, the NTSB concluded.
A Corporate Airlines flight, on behalf of
AMR Corp.’s American Airlines, crashed in 2004 and killed 13 people in Kirksville, Missouri, after pilots didn’t follow procedures and flew too low into trees, according to the NTSB.
Kevin Mitchell, chairman of the Business Travel Coalition, presented survey results at today’s hearing showing two-thirds of corporate travel managers say fliers say there are safety differences between large airlines and smaller partners.
About eight in 10 of those fliers avoid turboprop aircraft, according to Mitchell, whose group is based in Radnor, Pennsylvania. He said he surveyed 212 travel managers, agents and other professionals between Oct. 14 and 22.
“A majority of corporations indicate that they would be willing to pay much higher airfares in return for higher safety standards at the regional airlines,” Mitchell said in his survey findings.
To contact the reporter on this story:
John Hughes in Washington at
[email protected]
To contact the editor responsible for this story: Larry Liebert at
[email protected].