There have been countless threads about the Colgan crash started on pay, rest, fatigue, management compensation, training, primary training, etc. Everyone seems to be looking for the reason this went down. It seems that there is an urge to evaluate every single little factor and blow it way out of proportion. Yes, there is a chance that the barista at the Starbucks at EWR made the coffee a little weaker than Starbucks standards and the crew got slightly less caffene that normal. I think that as a community, we are missing the BIG picture.
It is OK to say the crew made multiple mistakes.
It is not disrespectful to the memories of the crew to say that they screwed up if that's what really happened. It IS disrespectful to all of our future passengers if we do not recognize this and learn from it.
We should focus on the last links of the error chain first.
As we have seen, there were many many links that ended up with the final result. There has been so much focus on the years (contract negotiations), months (recurrent training), days (rest and fatigue), and hours (chatting in sterile) leading up to the crash. There seems to be virtually no one talking about the moments before the crash.
Lets call a spade a spade.
Pending new information that Bombardier published the wrong approach speeds or Colgan's MX missed a deice system inspection, this seems pretty cut and dry. The crew seems to have made multiple mistakes in the final minutes. They were chatting in a super critical phase of flight (it was not just and approach, it was a night, IMC, icing approach). They let the aircraft get way too slow. They pulled up at the stick shaker. They raised the flaps too early in the stall recovery. They did not apply full power quick enough.
The other factors seem minimal compared to the major mistakes.
Ok, so they may have been a little tired, but both had days off prior to the flight. None of us can say that every single day we show up for work we are 100% fully rested and ready. Sometime's its schedulings fault, sometimes its ours. However, when it comes down to it, if we are in icing, at night, around mountains, in a situation that we may be unfamiliar with, most of us are at a hightened awareness. We are crossing our I's and dotting our T's and being super vigilant. We get adrenaline and wake up. We are super focused for 10 minutes to shoot the approach.
Lets focus on elementary reasons for elementary mistakes.
Why were they still chatting when they REALLY should have been paying attention? Did the captain have a Macho attitude? Really. I understand that this is flying 101, but he pulled up at the onset of a stall. That's flying 101 stuff.
Did the first officer not understand the DECIDE acronym. She chose to put the flaps up uncommanded. Did she really take second to decide if that was a good course of action?
What can we take away from this accident from a CRM perspective? It seems that although the Captain was not overbearing in a Skygod sense, he was in a conversational sense. He cut her off many times during normal conversation. Did this contribute to her not wanting to mention that they were getting slow? Was he so overbearing in conversation that he couldn't perform his own PF duties?
Maybe I'm a jerk for bringing this up, but it just seems like we are all dancing around what really happened here. Everyone in our community, the media, and congress seems to be using this to be championing a cause that is remotely related to what actually happened here. Am I the only one?