dera

The report says that the airplane likely had hardly any ice.

No-one knows who and why they activated the increased vref speeds. Neither pilot briefed it's use. They calculated Vref speeds with a clean wing, and the Vref was lower than shaker activation with Vref ice speeds.

word302

and most importantly, you stall the damn airplane....literally thousands of times. I got to the point that I could almost nap while teaching stalls.

stabapch

What’s not correct?

There is still lawsuits going on at Buffalo City Hall. I’ll tell ya first hand because I live there. The families affected by the crash still believe this was strictly caused because regionals put unqualified crew members at the controls. Chuck Schumer sold them on that one. That’s also the reason why there has been no ease to this regulation despite multiple advocates fighting against. Every time a new solution is brought up, those families represented by the law makers bat it down immediately, no matter how small of a change.

All the penny pinching shortcut practices that contract airlines were guilty of at that time were tucked away in a corner away from the public. Blame the pilots, they can’t defend their actions.

sailingfun

It’s been a long time since I read the report but I seem to remember that the accident had nothing to do with a tailplane stall or a increased stall speed because of ice. The airplane stalled almost exactly where it would be expected to with zero ice and no other issues. It was a straight aerodynamic stall caused by inattention to airspeed and pitching the aircraft noseup when it was not in a stalled condition followed by a totally botched stall recovery.

Edit:NTSB remarks

calculated that, with the extra lift required for a nose-up pitching maneuver, a Q400 airplane with no ice accretion could achieve 1.38Gs before encountering a wing stall at 125 knots (the airspeed at the time that the airplane entered the stall)The FDR indicated that the accident airplane had achieved a vertical acceleration of about 1.42 Gs during the initial pitch-up maneuver after the aft control column movement. Thus, the actual airplane performance was slightly better than the clean wing (no ice accretion) performance assumed in the AFM.

Personal remark, this accident was a classic example of why train to proficiency is a bad policy. You can train anyone to eventually pass a checkride. The military has long known that pilots who require extra training are far more likely to react incorrectly when confronted with actual emergencies or unexpected situations. In this case pulling the yoke back aggressively when confronted with a warning that the aircraft was approaching a stall and botching the recovery.

CanWeGetTheLeft

I wonder if Richard Collins had anything to say on the subject:

https://airfactsjournal.com/2014/03/...r-flight-3407/

This hot take has not aged well.

sailingfun

His thoughts are pretty spot on and he nailed it with this comment.

When you look at the captain of the Q400 it becomes clear that this was not pilot error, it was system error. There is simply no system in place to weed out the weaker pilots. Aviation may be unique in that a person can try and try again as many times as it takes to pass the test. That might be okay for most pilots but not for airline captains. The public expects and deserves the best there. The FAA and the airlines need to develop a system that ensures that.

JohnBurke

Yes and no. It was a factor, in part because of the change in speed warnings due to the ice switch position precipitated and early warning and reaction. The reason I brought it up was in response to a poster who claimed that there was no ice.

Train to proficiency is a very good thing, but that wasn't the case with this individual, who had failed four of his initial checkrides (private, instrument, commercial, multi) and three checkrides with the company. Proficiency wasn't the problem. Passing a checkride is not the same as proficiency.

The standard for stall recovery was systemically wrong throughout the industry, which valued loss of altitude over reduction of angle of attack, and for decades the practice in turbojet equipment was to minimize altitude loss while powering out of a stall. It was the Colgan mishap that pressured change in recognizing AoA as pre-eminent in recovery, instead of placing a premium on altitude.

Renslow could have powered through the event, had he simply maintained pitch and let the airplane fly out. His power application only reached 75%, and there was an increase in angle of attack. Colgan didn't train for tailplane ice or recovery, though Renslow's actions would have been consistent with a tailplane stall (power reduction, increase pitch/AoA, maintain or reduce flaps). There is some supposition that his actions were a reaction to a video shown (which harks back to Roselawn, in the ATR). In any event, it's clear that he progressed deeper into a stalled state and held it without ever reducing AoA.

Renslow was one of the 90 day wonders who bought his job with Gulfstream, and the CVR records him talking about that, how he short-cut the system and cataulted himself into his career by buying his way in. Renslow got where he was through Gulfstream, when he wouldn't have cut it at an operator where he would have had to compete for his job on an even keel or toe the line.

Multiple problems existed on that flight. Complaints that the current requirements for entry airline pilots have not contributed to safety fall flat in the face of a current unprecedented trend in aviation safety in the US; for the first time in the history of aviation, we have a decade of fatality-free flying in terms of aircraft mishaps, with the exception of ground fatality with an overrun. This has never happened before, and certainly changes in entry level piloting skill and background, and entry courses and ATP minimums and certification are a part of that overall picture. Likewise, changes in training and standards that have come as a result of the Colgan crash are also contributing factors to the current trend.

Nearly every change in the industry is one written in blood, the impetus of which is the loss of life and property resulting from one mishap or another. One can argue semantics, but can't argue the current safety record which, again unprecedented.

sailingfun

When he received the stall warning he pitched the nose up to 19 degrees using a 1.42 G pull. Not much you can add to that.
Train to proficiency is fine within a certain standard of deviation. The military has a pretty good grasp on that and does allow for limited extra training. The civilian world allows for unlimited extra training. It’s a bad policy. Military rules are often referred to as blood rules because spilt blood is how they came about. As a simple example the Navy has a blood rule about carrier qualification. If you disqual the first time you may repeat the CQ training and attempt it again. If you disqual the 2nd attempt you are out of the program even though at that point millions have been invested in the pilot. On the one occasion I am aware of where the Navy allowed a third attempt bowing to political pressure the pilot killed herself on a carrier approach shortly after joining her fleet squadron.

rickair7777

I don't buy the apologists who try to hint that the crew was trying to recover from a tailplane stall. That's graduate level knowledge which was never trained or checked in the sim. They were fatigued, distracted, and never mentioned the word "stall", much less "tailplane". No way that both of them (especially those two on that night), without coordination or communication, executed a non-standard procedure.

What they did learn in the sim was to minimize altitude loss... if you got beyond that aerodynamically speaking, you were on your own, and he wasn't up to that obviously.

Tough call re. train to proficiency. At some point you need folks who can think their way out of an unexpected situation under time pressure. Endlessly repeating the monkey motions of a PC might make you good enough to pass a PC, but it doesn't necessarily check your ability to react to the unexpected or unforeseen.

Nevjets

This is incorrect. Under the new rules, at least one of those pilots didn’t have an Atp or 1500 hours BEFORE flying their first 121 flight.