FRONTLINE >
Business / Economy / Financial >
Flying Cheap >
Internal Emails Reveal Doubts About Flight 3407 Pilot
A month later, Renslow —
who was hired by Colgan in 2005 with only 618 hours of flight time under his belt — was given the nod to fly Q400s.
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.