“Not a wallflower,” first officer saw pay cut, cross-country commute as entry routes to desirable but demanding airline career
Family, friends describe dedicated fliers
Rebecca Lynne Shaw loved flying so much she was willing to work for less than $24,000 a year, live with her parents and commute cross-country for her job as a first officer with Colgan Air. The competence and professionalism of the co-pilot of Continental Connection Flight 3407 came under fire last week during the National Transportation Safety Board’s hearings.
Shaw and pilot Marvin D. Renslow have been portrayed as inexperienced, undertrained and too fatigued to be at the controls. They have been faulted for chatting when they should have been paying closer attention to their control panel.
Experts have said the two were caught off guard when the plane rapidly lost speed. They said Shaw panicked and put the aircraft’s flaps up, worsening the stall –one of several mistakes from the cockpit that appear to have led to the crash.
But the reports by the safety board released to the public in the last few weeks, along with interviews with people who knew the two pilots, reveal a young woman who was serious about her work, devoted to flying and had won the respect of her colleagues.
Shaw, 24, known as “Beki” to her friends and loved ones, was doing everything she could to pursue her dream of becoming a pilot.
“She worked so hard and so diligently to reach her final goal,” her mother, Lyn Morris, told The Buffalo News after the third and final day of the hearings in Washington, D. C. “And we’re so proud that she made her dream.”
Troy Shaw, the first officer’s husband, told safety board investigators shortly after the crash that his wife was proud of being a pilot. What she liked best about working at Colgan, he said, was flying the Bombardier because she considered it an elite aircraft and enjoyable to fly.
“She felt accomplished to be flying it,” the summary continued. “He said she was proud to be the first female pilot for Colgan and Continental to be type-rate in the plane.”
During her senior year at Tahoma High School, outside of Seattle –an aviation industry hub –Shaw told her parents she wanted to be a pilot.
She attended Big Bend Community College for two years to study aviation. She then transferred to Central Washington University, where she received a degree in flight technology with a minor in philosophy in 2006.
Amy Hoover, chairwoman of the aviation department at Central Washington, remembered Shaw as “an incredibly energetic young lady – very vivacious.…Definitely not a wall flower.”
Shaw’s first jobs out of college involved flight instruction in Arizona.
Then in January 2008, she took a substantial pay cut to sign on with Colgan. In testimony last week, officials said her salary was just $16,000 a year, but Colgan officials later revealed it exceeded $23,900.
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Shaw’s first stint with Colgan was out of Norfolk, Va., where she worked a second job at a coffee shop to make ends meet. The airline said it discourages outside work but doesn’t prohibit it.
Her mother expressed surprise at the low airline pay. But Morris said her daughter understood that her pay would increase as she got more experience and was promoted.
Just two weeks before the crash, she and her husband drove from Virginia to Washington State, and she began what was to be her new routine of commuting via cargo plane to her new base at Newark Liberty Airport in New Jersey. She was to work three days on and three days off. The night before the crash, Shaw flew a red-eye aboard a FedEx plane to Memphis and then another to get to Newark.
Both Troy Shaw and Morris have disputed claims made during the hearings that Beki Shaw was tired and sick.
Shaw would get “the sniffles” in cold weather, her husband told investigators, but she didn’t have a cold when she left Seattle for Newark.
Morris noted that the cockpit transcript indicated her daughter sneezed once during the flight. The transcript also revealed her daughter complained of her ears being stuffed up.
“That’s not a cold,” she told The News.
Troy Shaw disputed claims that his wife was too tired to fly after a red-eye cross-country flight.
Beki Shaw slept well on the FedEx planes she took that night and caught another five to six hours of sleep at the airport, he said.
“As strange as it sounds, it’s easier to commute from the West Coast to the East Coast,” he said Friday morning on the NBC program “Today.”
Hoover said commercial airline crew members often live long distances from their bases.
“It wasn’t unusual at all,” Hoover said of Shaw’s cross-country commute. “People have been doing it for decades.”
In safety board interviews after the crash, Beki Shaw’s colleagues recalled her as a competent flier.
John Dowd, a captain of a Q400 who had flown with Shaw a half dozen times, said he thought she had “a good reputation among captains” and “all thought she did a good job,” the summary of his interview indicated. He said he believed she would have gone on to become a captain.
“She was not meek and mild, and she performed her duties and handled herself well,” he also said.
Jonathan David Miller, another Q400 captain, told the safety board that Shaw was “professional, always businesslike” and had a “friendly style.” He said her greatest strength was her “energy and assertiveness.”
Curiously, while Shaw says in the cockpit transcript she never had encountered icing –a statement that was highlighted over and over last week in the media –one pilot told investigators that he remembered deicing while flying with Shaw as a first officer. A second captain said he was on a plane with her while it was deiced on the ground.
In the last few minutes before the crash, Shaw communicated with the control tower. Things seemed routine as she repeated, in rapid-fire pace, the directions for getting the plane in place for landing.
The transcription of the conversation in the cockpit showed the situation then suddenly turned tense as the landing gear was deployed and the flaps raised.
The last sounds in the cockpit, recorded at 10:16 p. m., are Shaw saying, “We’re –” and then her scream.
e-mail mbecker@buffnews.com
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