Editor's note: This has been the safest decade in U.S. aviation history — but Buffalo learned the hard way that there's at least one gaping hole in that safety record, at the regional airlines. Since the crash of Continental Connection Flight 3407 claimed 50 lives in Clarence in February, News Albany Bureau chief Tom Precious and Washington Bureau chief Jerry Zremski have been investigating the training and experience levels of regional airline pilots. This is the first of four parts.

You are sitting in a 50-seat propeller plane heading home to Buffalo, and out the window you see ice on the wings. Ten rows in front of you, someone else also may be encountering mid-air icing for the first time: Your co-pilot.

Your flight attendant tells you what to do in the event of a water landing — but odds are that the pilot never had to practice landing on water.

And in the rare chance that your plane flips upside down or falls into a spin, it's quite likely that your pilot never practiced in a plane how to regain control.

Those are just some of the findings of a months-long Buffalo News investigation into a basic question: Whether airline pilots receive all the training they need, especially to come out alive from an emegency situation.

The answer is no, according to an analysis of federal safety data and interviews with dozens of pilots and other aviation experts.

Regional airlines — which operate commuter flights under the names of the big airlines — in particular employ a squadron of rookies hired with just a fraction of the training pilots received decades ago.

The result: During an era of unprecedented safety at the major airlines, when only one person died in an accident tied to pilot mistakes, 64 died in regional airline crashes tied to pilot error between 2004 and 2008.

And that doesn't include Continental Connection Flight 3407, the flight that claimed 50 lives in Clarence in February in a crash believed to be caused by pilot error.

Moreover, regional pilots make far more mistakes than their colleagues at larger airlines.

An analysis of five years of federal data found that nearly 28 percent of regional airline accidents and incidents were tied to aviator error — twice the rate of the major airlines.

Aviation pros attribute that disparity in part to the fact that regional pilots make so many more take-offs and landings than pilots for the majors do and take-offs and landings are the most risk-prone part of any flight.

Yet dozens of pilots, safety experts, air traffic controllers, mechanics, instructors and others The News interviewed the past several months said inadequate training was also a major problem at regional airlines.

What should airline passengers think?

"They should be concerned," said Jeffrey Skiles, co-pilot of the US Airways plane that made an emergency landing on the Hudson River this year.

Many regional pilots "simply do not have the flying skills for the position," Skiles said.

"So they have to develop them with paying passengers in the back."

And many of those passengers probably don't even know they are flying on a regional airline, since the planes bear the markings of the major airline and the pilots wear the same uniforms as at the big-name carriers.

For example, Corporate Airlines ran the American Connection flight that claimed 13 lives in Missouri in 2004 in an accident investigators blamed in part on pilot fatigue and"unprofessional behavior."

And Comair, a Delta subsidiary, operated the plane that crashed in Kentucky in 2006 after the pilots took off from the wrong runway, killing 49.

The problems with pilots at such airlines, other pilots say, begin in the early stages of flying, when some basic airmanship skills are under-emphasized.

Several pilots said they know pilots who did their pre-airline flying in the Southwest— without ever flying in a cloud — and then were hired by a regional carrier flying in the wintry Northeast.

"Wow, wow," a new first officer said to his pilot on a regional airline plane, according to Louis Smith, a veteran pilot who runs FltOps.com, an Alabama-based professional pilot career advisory firm.

"What's wrong?" the pilot asked.

"Clouds, man. I've never flown in actual weather."

Sun Belt training Pilots say a majority of today's young regional pilots get their training in Sun Belt flight schools or from instructors who train in perfect conditions for the perfect flight— and that produces a wide variety of pilots, good and not so good.

"There's no doubt that the experience of the pilot and the training are key," said Kit Darby, president of KitDarby.com Aviation Consulting, who has tracked pilot hiring trends for two decades. "The regionals have just been hiring people with less experience than in the past."

Things were much different years ago, when most pilots learned to fly in the military.

"There's a distinct difference in the training of military pilots, acrobatic pilots and straight civilian pilots," said Paul W. Comtois, director of aircraft upset recovery training and research at the NASTAR Center, which offers pilots simulator training.

In the absence of rigorously trained military veterans, airlines now look for pilot candidates from a wide range of other sources.

At the top of the tier, aviation experts said, are four-year programs at colleges scattered around the country.

Other would-be pilots head to private flight schools that critics deride as "pilot mills," places that boast of pushing out pilots in a few months straight to a regional airline.

And others get their initial training at a local airport with a private instructor, building up their hours serving as fledgling instructors themselves.

You can get a job as a co-pilot with any of those backgrounds, so long as you have a commercial pilot's license, which requires a mere 250 hours of flight time. That can include anything from hauling banners along a beach and ferrying tourists above Niagara Falls to flying for a small cargo company.

The bottom line, aviation experts said, is that some co-pilots get hired without the right kind of experience.

"You hire somebody with 250 or 300 hours and put them in a regional jet, and it's a totally different game," said a pilot for a major regional carrier who, like most pilots The News interviewed, spoke on condition of anonymity for fear he would lose his job if he were identified.

 "With 250 hours, you don't really know a lot," the pilot said. "You barely are used to talking on the radio."

And while pilots still need 1,500 hours of experience and a federal Airline Transport License to serve as a plane's captain, even pilots worry that today's ad-hoc training system leaves pilots not with a second-in-command, but a second-in-training.

"You don't want a doctor learning on you the first time or even a plumber. You don't want them learning as first officers at a regional," said a first officer for a major regional airline.

Hired with more than 1,000 hours, he said he was amazed at how few hours some colleagues in his training class had logged.

"There was one kid with 400 hours. He did swell. But others with those kinds of hours are kind of shaky," the pilot said.

You'll see more signs of shakiness in National Transportation Safety Board reports on the dozens of comparatively minor aviation incidents or accidents that occur each year.

For example, in Rapid City, S.D., in 2004, a Skywest plane's left wing scraped the ground upon landing. Safety investigators blamed the co-pilot, who had 15 hours of flight time in the plane.

And in Minneapolis in April 2008, a Mesaba Airlines regional pilot stalled out the engines before takeoff. Investigators said "the flying pilot's lack of total experience in the make and model of airplane" contributed to the incident.

On the cheap

What's more, industry insiders say the training these fledgling pilots receive after they are hired at many regionals is done on the cheap — and often isn't strict enough to

"wash out" those not suited to ferry people across the skies.

Major carriers do a better job of pilot training than regionals, in large part because of finances, said Mark Rosenker, who headed the National Transportation Safety Board at the time of the Colgan crash.

"They do hit or miss," he said of regional airline training.

Regional airlines argue that they meet minimum FAA standards, but Rosenker said: "Just because it's the minimum doesn't mean it's good."

Nevertheless, Roger Cohen, the president of the Regional Airline Association, defended the industry's hiring and training practices.

"Many of the issues you raise need to be addressed and can be improved," Cohen said. "But this does not mean that the current standards and practices are inadequate or put lives in danger. Rather, they can be modified and amended to increase safety even further still."

Regional airlines this summer introduced a "strategic safety initiative" that addresses pilot fatigue and other issues. In addition, Cohen said many regionals take part in voluntary government sponsored safety programs "that not only meet, but exceed the highest standards globally."

While major carriers with deep pockets train their pilots in their own simulator facilities, most regionals contract with simulator centers that are so busy that some run 24 hours a day.

Regional pilots there learn an airline's procedures. Pilots are tested in the simulator and then in a plane, with passengers, where they fly with a "check airman" in the captain's seat for a total of 30 hours or more, depending on the carrier.

But pilots say it's a "teaching to the test" structure that offers few surprises to test for uncommon, though potentially lethal, occurrences.

"It never happens in a check ride where you go into ice and then go slow and stall," a regional pilot said. "They will ask you to stall, but it is real basic and in perfect weather.

They don't add the stress or other variables."

Along the way, much remains untaught.

For years, many regionals — like Colgan Air, which operated Flight 3407 — left training for icing conditions largely to a 10-year-old, 30-minute, NASA-produced video.

That video focused in part on the rare phenomenon of plane tail icing. That's a problem, because a pilot's proper response to tail icing is exactly the wrong response to a wing stall.

The pilot of Continental Connection Flight 3407, Capt. Marvin Renslow, picked the wrong response.

Many airlines rely on just that video, despite the lessons supposedly learned after a crew with no wintertime experience crashed an Air Florida plane into a bridge in a Washington snowstorm in 1982.

That fact led to a pointed discussion at a recent Senate hearing between Sen. Byron Dorgan, D-N.D., and FAA Administrator Randy Babbitt.

"Mr. Babbitt, could a pilot be hired today and be in a cockpit today similar to the Air

Florida flight that had not seen deicing previously?"

"Yes, sir," replied Babbitt, a former airline pilot.

"And how is it, after 30 years, that nothing has changed?"

"Well, that's a question that I've had six months to work on so far," Babbitt said earlier this month.

One pilot who trains pilots at a regional airline said in-flight icing is discussed, but that the simulators the airline uses have their limits and can't really duplicate icing conditions. The pilot said some regional carriers make no adjustments in training depending on whether the pilots fly Northeast or Florida routes.

"The more weather training you have, the better you can handle the systems. Weather is a hairy way to fly," said Walt Rouse, a retired aviation professor at the North Carolina community college Renslow attended and first got his desire to become a pilot.

Worse yet, pilots get limited hands-on training on one of the worst things that can happen to a plane: an aerodynamic stall, when a plane can't produce enough lift to keep it flying.

A half-century ago, pilots were trained to handle stalls. But now, training focuses more on stall avoidance, said one former safety board investigator.

The National Transportation Safety Board has over the years pushed for greater stall training standards — both to avoid and get out of stalls. But push-back from the industry has largely left it up the airlines to decide how far to take stall training.

It means some pilots are unfamiliar with the equipment designed to rescue planes from stalls.

Planes like Colgan's Q400 that crashed in Clarence have a safety device known as a "stick pusher," which engaged that fateful night to try to get the plane out of its stall — but Renslow overrode the stick pusher.

One Colgan pilot said he never had any training in the stick pusher — until after the February crash.

"I never even saw the stick pusher before," he said. "I assumed I knew how to react to it, but I never actually saw or felt it."

Instead of the device being part of simulator training, pilots were told about it, he said.

That has changed since the crash.

Colgan said Renslow and the first officer received adequate and proper training. In documents filed with the safety board, the airline said Renslow and co-pilot Rebecca Shaw were both "well-trained" in winter flying.

Yet there are eerie precursors to the Colgan crash in the federal safety reports.

On an icy night in January 2006, an American Eagle plane stalled over California after the crew let the plane's speed drop too much — just as the crew of Flight 3407 did. The American Eagle crew was able to recover, however.

And in an October 2004 flight with no passengers aboard, two pilots for Pinnacle Airlines— Colgan's parent — flew their plane to an unsafe altitude. They then mishandled the plane's stall, just as Renslow did, and crashed and died in Jefferson City, Mo.

Investigators blamed that crash on the crew's unprofessionalism and lack of airmanship skills, "which resulted in an in-flight emergency from which they were unable to recover, in part because of the pilots' inadequate training."

Regulations on front burner

While the safety board has been citing training issues for years, the Colgan crash put the issue on the front burner in the aviation industry and in Congress.

Seven months after the February crash, the Air Line Pilots Association, the pilots' union, released a white paper on the state of airline hiring and training. Its conclusion: "A complete overhaul of pilot selection and training methods is needed."

Meanwhile, the families of the Flight 3407 victims pressed Congress for a new requirement that all co-pilots have 1,500 hours of flying experience.

While it's unclear whether Congress will adopt that standard, Flight 3407 is sure to influence the revised training rules the FAA is set to unveil in February.

Skiles, for instance, noted talk in the aftermath of the Buffalo crash of another early warning system being placed in planes to warn pilots of impending stalls.

"This is just something to compensate for putting people in the pilot seats that shouldn't be there in the first place," he said.

Rosenker, the former NTSB head, said the airline industry, overall, is safe and has made great strides in lowering plane crash fatality rates. But more is needed, he said.

"The Buffalo accident was a real call to action," Rosenker said.

Some things have already changed. One Colgan pilot said the airline has vastly improved its stall training.

"Since the crash, they've developed a new program with much more realistic situations," the pilot said.

Pilots said that more needs to be done.

In particular, they said federal rules should mandate that every pilot get hands-on instruction to deal with "airplane upsets."

The upsets can be caused by anything from a stall to wind shear to the wake turbulence from a nearby jet. The safety board has urged better and mandatory training, and the FAA's Babbitt said the agency is planning to include it in its new training regulations.

What should be taught?

"The ability to recover, so if a plane flips upside down, you can recover," said a former senior safety board accident investigator, who spoke on condition of anonymity.

Safety board insiders have long complained that the FAA has ignored their ideas for improving safety.

"It comes down to money," Barrett Byrnes, a former air traffic controller at John F. Kennedy Airport in New York who has worked with the safety board on crash investigations, said of airline pressure on the FAA to keep certain expensive training requirements as voluntary.

But Rosenker, who spent seven years at the safety board, said the past year has shown there are big differences in the levels of piloting skills. He noted the Colgan disaster came a month after Capt. Chesley Sullenberger and Skiles successfully landed their plane on the Hudson.

That landing showed airmanship skills, created a hero and infused the nation with an "America is back" feeling in the midst of the recession, Rosenker said.

"Then, 40 days later, it was burst by this terrible thing in Buffalo," he added.

"What were the differences?" the former safety board chairman said. "You have a guy with some 25,000 hours, former Air Force pilot, military trained flying big iron against a 3,300-hour captain who did not seem to have as much training as perhaps there needed to be."

tprecious@buffnews.com ; jzremski@buffnews.comnull