Great post skybolt.

"Good judgment comes from experience, experience comes from bad judgment".

Not all 3,000 hours are equal… For example, a pilot who has been exposed (for 3, 000 hours) to the sheltered environment of FAR 121 flying ONLY, may not be prepared for the 1% of the time that can potentially expose him/her to a catastrophic event (e.g., dual engine failure after bird strikes on take-off, or a stall in night IMC at low altitude). On the other hand, a pilot who has flown 3,000 hours in many different environments, such as single pilot, CFi, night freight, charter, military – in several different airplanes, is more likely to be prepared to handle the demands of that 1% of the time. That’s what experience is all about.

Today, we fly very reliable airplanes; consequently, it’s very easy to fall into the complacency trap that makes us believe we are great pilots because we grease the landing after an uneventful flight. Lets do our profession a favor and don’t fall for that fallacy.

Lets face it, anybody can be a “good” pilot when everything is working properly or an “abnormal” is easily found in the QRH. In contrast, professionals excel when they are faced with exceptional situations.

+1 on this post too!

I've been reading the various threads on this crash, and wanted to post some thoughts, but Skybolt summed it up perfectly. Pilots need to have a solid background in airmanship before they get into Part 121 ops. I've been flying 121 for 13 years now, and had 7 years of military flying before that. Most of my 121 time is exactly the same hour repeated a few thousand times. Still, the basic stick and rudder skills that I learned early on keep me right in the center of the envelope when flying passengers. Nice, safe, and comfortable.

When you look at the NTSB reenactment of the Colgan crash and see the airspeed drop 50 knots or so in a space of less than a minute, you have to ask yourself: What pilot could allow this to happen? I don't care how tired you are; when you're in the approach phase, your eyes are on the instruments whether you're the flying pilot or the pilot monitoring. Another example is the Pinnacle RJ crash. The pilots climbed to FL410 and the airspeed was what, a hundred and eighty knots indicated or something? No alarm bells going off here?

How much money is Colgan (and their insurers) going to lose in the lawsuits? Probably hundreds of millions. How much would it have cost them to pay their pilots more, thereby attracting much better pilot applicants? I dunno, maybe 2 or 3 million. I hope the lawyers stick it to them, and maybe, just maybe, the rest of the industry will wake up. Not holding my breath, though.

[quote=skybolt;612597]My point is simply that pilots who ENTER the airline business having never learned to deal with the edge of the envelope will NEVER be trained by the airlines to deal with that possibility. If a pilot has poor stick and rudder skills and inadequate stick and rudder sense, the airline flying and training environment will NOT impart those qualities to that pilot. A pilot must gain good flying "sense" from somewhere other than the airline training department.


Bolt - Great thread. I was fortunate enough to be a Standardization pilot in Navy primary training and as such got to train other instructor pilots. The best part of the syllabus was out of control flight training or OCF. We would put the instructor trainee in numerous situations such as inverted flight, zero airspeed departures (90 degrees nose up and zero airspeed), approach turn stalls, skidded turn stalls, spins etc - it was a blast, and the best part was that you would soon be recovering the aircraft instinctively. I am sure that civilian aerobatic pilots have similar training experiences.
I think this would be a huge advantage in recovering an aircraft, just as the "windshear" simulation in recurrent would help us in a actual windshear type of situation. Think about how much more difficult an actual windshear recovery would be without the training - same thing applies for upsets.

Scoop

Great post skybolt. I think we can all agree that experience is needed. However where do you draw the line? Both had experience (121 and CFI). Would an ATP suffice? The captain had one and it still happened. The FO was a flight instructor with more than enough time to obtain an ATP and it still happened. Anybody can be trained to PTS standards to pass a checkride. Pilot factories like ALLATPs are proof positive of this. Cooperate to graduate.

What bothers me most about this accident is the overlooked fact that the FO raised the flaps. You're slow, have a bunch of ice on the aircraft and make a configuration change. I think this cardinal sin is being forgotten by everybody, including ourselves. I think this is the fundamental part that skybolt is talking about.

Experience plays a huge part but no amount of experience can trump a poor decision. We've seen plenty of experienced crews make stupid choices that ended with a smoking hole in the ground.

An extremely small portion of the fare goes to paying the flight crew. For the average flight on a regional airline it's somewhere around $5 for the flight per passenger.

Of course we are talking about the same people that will put their 2 year old on their lap for the flight to avoid buying another ticket...

The Problem is:

Pilot Error

It can happen to any pilot: military or civilain trained, High time or low, fat wallet or skinny.

Good thread bolt.

Civilian CFIs with 500 hours dual given have been on the edge of the envelope many times.

Military pilots have many training flights at the edge of the envelope.

Repeat from regional thread pertinent to this discussion:

jonnyjetprop - Of course it was pilot error, anytime a perfectly good airplane is put in the dirt there is pilot error involved. Once upon a time, investigations ended right then and there: the pilots screwed up. After years and years of crashes caused by pilots screwing up, we eventually came to realize that investigations must go further to find out why the pilots screwed up to have any hope of preventing repeats. There are often cultural and environmental factors that are much, much bigger than the pilots involved. This is one of those cases, I think.

This is what my wife said after watching this on the news. She has 10 hours dual from 20 years ago. She still knows stall recovery. She never even soloed.