A good read advocating greater use of auto throttles and how they may have prevented the Colgan accident.

Flying Magazine - We Need 3-D Safety

Also, great quote from the article:
"Real advances in safety are made by expecting human errors to occur and then devising ways to avoid dying because of those mistakes".

Should be words to live by for anyone working in aviation safety and training.

Autothrottles are great and they certainly do provide another layer of safety in many instances.

But if a pilot needs them in order to not get themselves in to a sticky situation, then they are too inept to deserve their seat in the first place.

Contrails, right on man. They had two safety systems installed to PREVENT a stall ... the indication and stick pusher. We all see how well that worked out.

The ATS probably would have saved them. Same thing goes if they would have been paying attention instead of all the chit chat.

Oh, but there's someone out there that's going to say it is management's fault. Rubbish.

It's been a while since I've read the transcript, but it seems like towards the end there wasn't that much chit chat. Overall, my impression was that they were discussing the same things all pilots discuss. Did they violate sterile cockpit? Sure. Just like the rest of us have. We have all seen it on our own aircraft, as well as jumping on other aircraft. Feds and check airmen, also. Regional and major. The real issue is the lack of airmanship.

SA..situational awareness.....

Yup.

Funny how some people thing increased automation is the cause of a lack of SA, while others thing increased automation is a silver-bullet fix for these kinds of events.

FLY THE FREAKING AIRPLANE, PEOPLE!!!

They lost SA.
How do we know?
They crashed
Why did they crash?
They lost SA.

(classification is not explanation. Sydney Dekker)

I too agree that while this was not the most pristine cockpit it certainly wasn't the worst. Challenge and response. Briefings. Questions. Communications. The inference they were flirting is a good reason to not let CVRs be read by dolts looking for a headline. Anyway, lots of good events here but for some reason, they locked up and lost what.. 50kts in about :30 seconds. The big question is why. Not to offend but saying a crew lost SA is just an updated version of 'pilot error'. It doesn 't explain.

As mentioned before, this one is going to be like the F-28 in Canada, Air Ontario 1363, where just about everybody and everything came up short, not just the crew and their performance.