In order to participate in the GunBroker Member forums, you must be logged in with your GunBroker.com account. Click the sign-in button at the top right of the forums page to get connected.
Pilot Error Caused Buffalo Crash
allen griggs
Member Posts: 35,509 ✭✭✭✭
*
Pilots Chatted in Moments Before Buffalo Crash
nytimes.com
By MATTHEW L. WALD
Published: May 12, 2009
WASHINGTON - For most of their 59-minute flight, from Newark to a spot five miles northeast of a runway in Buffalo on Feb. 12, the two pilots of Continental Connection Flight 3407 chatted happily about career options, family plans and the merits of various kinds of airplanes.
The captain, Marvin D. Renslow, regaled his first officer, Rebecca Shaw, with the story of how wide his passengers' eyes grew one day when he called maintenance to the plane after a light in the cockpit signaled loose metal chips in the engine.
Some of the banter violated federal rules banning nonessential conversation below 10,000 feet. Some of the talk was serious. The pilots spoke of the ice they saw gathering on the windshield of their commuter plane, and of their apprehension during previous brushes with ice. They prepared for landing.
Co-pilot Rebecca Shaw
Then, at 10:16 p.m., crisis struck. The stick shaker - part of a safety system that warns the crew if the plane is about to stall - began vibrating vigorously. A horn went off in the cockpit. The talk turned clipped and urgent.
"Jesus Christ," Captain Renslow said. "We're down." There was a scream.
Twenty-six seconds after the alarms went off, Flight 3407 plunged into a house in Clarence, N.Y., killing all 49 people aboard and a man on the ground, in the nation's deadliest transportation accident in more than seven years.
A transcript of those words and sounds, captured by the cockpit voice recorder, was released during a hearing Tuesday as the National Transportation Safety Board began three days of inquiry into the causes of the crash. An animation of the flight's last minutes was shown. Relatives of the victims watched intently.
And officials of Colgan Air, the company that operated the Continental flight, offered startling testimony that pointed fingers at their own pilots.
John Erwin Barrett, the airline's director of flight standards, said neither pilot in the twin-engine turboprop was paying attention to the flight instruments. A month after the crash, he said, a Colgan crew in the same model plane, a Bombardier Dash 8 Q400 on approach to Burlington, Vt., received the same warning of a stall, and recovered smoothly, landing without incident.
"When they received the stall warning they were alert and ready to react," Mr. Barrett said of the crew in Vermont. But in the February crash, he said, "the crew was not ready to respond to a stall warning when it was activated - it kind of caught them by surprise."
The airline's director of operations, Dean Bandavanis, said he thought the crew lacked "integrity," which he defined as "doing the right thing when nobody's watching."
The pilots' chatting obviously violated Federal Aviation Administration rules that ban nonessential conversation when a plane is below 10,000 feet, as the Continental flight was as Captain Renslow asked about Ms. Shaw's head cold.
The pilots - clearly distracted - let their speed drop too low, and failed to notice, according to documents released Tuesday by the safety board. The stick shaker began vibrating, alerting them to an impending stall, a combination of air speed and aircraft angle that causes the wings to lose lift. And, the documents show, Captain Renslow did exactly the wrong thing; he pulled back on the control yoke, to raise the nose, rather than pushing forward to lower it.
The safety board, though, is exploring a variety of issues beyond the crew's inattention. Among them is the training the pilots received for handling stalls, and whether the airline acted properly in keeping Captain Renslow on as a pilot. He had failed three "check-rides," or tests in a cockpit or a simulator, before working for Colgan - it said it knew of only one failure before it hired him - then failed two more while flying for Colgan. That many failures is unusual, a Colgan official conceded in testimony.
In a deposition released by the board, another Colgan official, Mr. Barrett, said that when pilots failed check-rides, Colgan had to decide whether to give more training or fire the pilot. He said he could not recall whether the company had evaluated Mr. Renslow's repeated failures.
Cockpit voice recordings are ordinarily transcribed only after an incident or crash, and the transcripts often reveal irrelevant conversation. Safety officials increasingly complain about the difficulty of eliminating human error and a common contributor, inattention.
Many recent crashes have raised questions about training and judgment, as opposed to mechanical failure - for example, the crash of another twin-engine turboprop, in Kirksville, Mo., in 2004, in which the crew violated operating rules and joked and yawned as they descended into the trees. The pilot of American Airlines Flight 587, which crashed in Queens in November 2001, used the rudder in a way that made the plane swing back and forth until the tail broke off.
In the Buffalo flight, safety board investigators say the pilot and his first officer had set themselves up for problems before they even arrived for work.
Captain Renslow had flown to Newark from his home in Florida the previous evening and had apparently slept in the crew lounge of Newark Liberty International Airport, a room not much different from a frequent-flier club lounge. Pilots are warned not to try to sleep there, under threat of dismissal.
Other pilots interviewed by board investigators said that Captain Renslow had discussed renting a "crash pad" to sleep at near the airport, though he never did.
First Officer Shaw had left her home in Maple Valley, near Seattle, and taken an evening flight in the cockpit of a FedEx cargo jet to Memphis. Then, in the middle of the night, she transferred to the cockpit of another plane bound for Newark.
Investigators said it was not clear whether either pilot could have gotten any sleep during the day of the flight.
According to board officials, at one point Colgan Air warned crew members who lived far from Newark not to try to fly in the same day a shift began. But the airline's most recent instructions to pilots do not include that warning.
In February, of the 137 pilots working for Colgan in Newark, 93 identified themselves as living far away, according to the board.
The safety board, which is simply gathering evidence in the hearings, will probably not issue a report until early next year.
Pilots Chatted in Moments Before Buffalo Crash
nytimes.com
By MATTHEW L. WALD
Published: May 12, 2009
WASHINGTON - For most of their 59-minute flight, from Newark to a spot five miles northeast of a runway in Buffalo on Feb. 12, the two pilots of Continental Connection Flight 3407 chatted happily about career options, family plans and the merits of various kinds of airplanes.
The captain, Marvin D. Renslow, regaled his first officer, Rebecca Shaw, with the story of how wide his passengers' eyes grew one day when he called maintenance to the plane after a light in the cockpit signaled loose metal chips in the engine.
Some of the banter violated federal rules banning nonessential conversation below 10,000 feet. Some of the talk was serious. The pilots spoke of the ice they saw gathering on the windshield of their commuter plane, and of their apprehension during previous brushes with ice. They prepared for landing.
Co-pilot Rebecca Shaw
Then, at 10:16 p.m., crisis struck. The stick shaker - part of a safety system that warns the crew if the plane is about to stall - began vibrating vigorously. A horn went off in the cockpit. The talk turned clipped and urgent.
"Jesus Christ," Captain Renslow said. "We're down." There was a scream.
Twenty-six seconds after the alarms went off, Flight 3407 plunged into a house in Clarence, N.Y., killing all 49 people aboard and a man on the ground, in the nation's deadliest transportation accident in more than seven years.
A transcript of those words and sounds, captured by the cockpit voice recorder, was released during a hearing Tuesday as the National Transportation Safety Board began three days of inquiry into the causes of the crash. An animation of the flight's last minutes was shown. Relatives of the victims watched intently.
And officials of Colgan Air, the company that operated the Continental flight, offered startling testimony that pointed fingers at their own pilots.
John Erwin Barrett, the airline's director of flight standards, said neither pilot in the twin-engine turboprop was paying attention to the flight instruments. A month after the crash, he said, a Colgan crew in the same model plane, a Bombardier Dash 8 Q400 on approach to Burlington, Vt., received the same warning of a stall, and recovered smoothly, landing without incident.
"When they received the stall warning they were alert and ready to react," Mr. Barrett said of the crew in Vermont. But in the February crash, he said, "the crew was not ready to respond to a stall warning when it was activated - it kind of caught them by surprise."
The airline's director of operations, Dean Bandavanis, said he thought the crew lacked "integrity," which he defined as "doing the right thing when nobody's watching."
The pilots' chatting obviously violated Federal Aviation Administration rules that ban nonessential conversation when a plane is below 10,000 feet, as the Continental flight was as Captain Renslow asked about Ms. Shaw's head cold.
The pilots - clearly distracted - let their speed drop too low, and failed to notice, according to documents released Tuesday by the safety board. The stick shaker began vibrating, alerting them to an impending stall, a combination of air speed and aircraft angle that causes the wings to lose lift. And, the documents show, Captain Renslow did exactly the wrong thing; he pulled back on the control yoke, to raise the nose, rather than pushing forward to lower it.
The safety board, though, is exploring a variety of issues beyond the crew's inattention. Among them is the training the pilots received for handling stalls, and whether the airline acted properly in keeping Captain Renslow on as a pilot. He had failed three "check-rides," or tests in a cockpit or a simulator, before working for Colgan - it said it knew of only one failure before it hired him - then failed two more while flying for Colgan. That many failures is unusual, a Colgan official conceded in testimony.
In a deposition released by the board, another Colgan official, Mr. Barrett, said that when pilots failed check-rides, Colgan had to decide whether to give more training or fire the pilot. He said he could not recall whether the company had evaluated Mr. Renslow's repeated failures.
Cockpit voice recordings are ordinarily transcribed only after an incident or crash, and the transcripts often reveal irrelevant conversation. Safety officials increasingly complain about the difficulty of eliminating human error and a common contributor, inattention.
Many recent crashes have raised questions about training and judgment, as opposed to mechanical failure - for example, the crash of another twin-engine turboprop, in Kirksville, Mo., in 2004, in which the crew violated operating rules and joked and yawned as they descended into the trees. The pilot of American Airlines Flight 587, which crashed in Queens in November 2001, used the rudder in a way that made the plane swing back and forth until the tail broke off.
In the Buffalo flight, safety board investigators say the pilot and his first officer had set themselves up for problems before they even arrived for work.
Captain Renslow had flown to Newark from his home in Florida the previous evening and had apparently slept in the crew lounge of Newark Liberty International Airport, a room not much different from a frequent-flier club lounge. Pilots are warned not to try to sleep there, under threat of dismissal.
Other pilots interviewed by board investigators said that Captain Renslow had discussed renting a "crash pad" to sleep at near the airport, though he never did.
First Officer Shaw had left her home in Maple Valley, near Seattle, and taken an evening flight in the cockpit of a FedEx cargo jet to Memphis. Then, in the middle of the night, she transferred to the cockpit of another plane bound for Newark.
Investigators said it was not clear whether either pilot could have gotten any sleep during the day of the flight.
According to board officials, at one point Colgan Air warned crew members who lived far from Newark not to try to fly in the same day a shift began. But the airline's most recent instructions to pilots do not include that warning.
In February, of the 137 pilots working for Colgan in Newark, 93 identified themselves as living far away, according to the board.
The safety board, which is simply gathering evidence in the hearings, will probably not issue a report until early next year.
Comments
One of the first things you learn.
Margaret Thatcher
"There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies and statistics."
Mark Twain
Everybody wants an experienced doctor, lawyer, or pilot. They just don't want them to get the experience on their dime.
Sounds like this pilot was incapable of learning from experience. He should have been fired after he faild for the 3rd time.
How hard can it be to fly a buffalo?
[:D]
I have know several guys who were in the Guard flying one aircraft or another. They never had what it took to become an aircraft commander in their units, regularly busted check rides, etc. These guys were pilots for small commuter lines. I have recurring nightmares about boarding a plane and hearing one of their voices say "Good Morning, this is your captain speaking..."
Sad that it had to cost those people their lives.
Stall warning? First thing you do is nose down and add throttle.
One of the first things you learn.
That's right.
The first thing a rookie pilot learns is:
A stall will kill you.
If a stall is beginning, push the stick forward, and add throttle.
This guy pulled back the stick? Unbelievable error.
Ice disrupts the flow, plane falls.
Stall warning, push control forward and add throttle. Get enough air flowing over the wing so you have control. Otherwise plane falls from the sky.
Margaret Thatcher
"There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies and statistics."
Mark Twain
My prayers to those who outlived their loved ones.
Doug