COMMENTARY
If they knew Feb. 12 what we know now . . .
As I write this early Tuesday night, there is one thing I am thinking more than anything else. I am wondering whether 47 people—everyone but the pilot and co-pilot— would have boarded Continental Connection Flight 3407 on Feb. 12 if they knew then what we know now.
We know now that the pilot had a spotty testing record, limited experience and questionable training. We know now that the co-pilot flew cross-country overnight to get to the departure city and climbed into the cockpit feeling weary and sick. We found out Tuesday that, just 14 minutes before her life ended, co-pilot Rebecca Shaw noted ice on the windshield and made a chilling admission: “I’ve never seen icing conditions. I’ve never de-iced.”
I wonder if those 47 people would have walked onto that plane, operated by commuter airline Colgan Air, had they known all of that.
The more we hear of the back story of this doomed flight, the more questions we have about the readiness of the often overstressed and undertrained folks who fly for smaller airlines.
The National Transportation Safety Board began its hearings into the crash Tuesday. It was the grimly appropriate three-month anniversary of the tragedy that killed all 49 people on board and a man on the ground. Included was a transcript of the pilots’ conversation during the flight.
Somehow, neither pilot Marvin Renslow nor co-pilot Shaw realized that the airplane was not flying fast enough to stay in the sky until a mere 26 seconds before Flight 3407 landed atop Doug and Karen Wielinski’s house in Clarence Center.
You read this stuff, you hear about Renslow’s limited experience, you listen to testimony that—when the plane’s emergency-alerting “stick shaker” activated—he apparently made the fatal-times-50 mistake of pulling back on the yoke. The action, say experts, worsened the troubled plane’s situation and sealed the fate of all aboard. It raises a huge question about the training and experience logged by Renslow —and other pilots of commuter airlines.
Bill Wielinski is the brother of Doug Wielinski, who died when the plane landed on his house. Wielinski was one of about two dozen relatives and friends of victims gathered at a Cheektowaga hotel to watch a simulcast of the safety board hearings from Washington.
“I’m a guy who says the buck stops at the top, not at the bottom,” Wielinski said. “They’re saying it’s the pilot’s fault, but maybe he was put in a situation he couldn’t control. . . . And that’s a tragedy, not spending a couple of dollars to train pilots so they can keep 50 people safe.”
The airline industry does so much right, in terms of safety, it is a shock when something goes so wrong. Thousands of planes take off and land every week, in all sorts of weather, without anybody getting so much as a scratch. Flying a plane seems almost as simple and as safe as pulling a car in and out of the driveway. But, of course, it is not.
“There’s planes up there now where people are not [properly] trained, and that’s scary,” Wielinski said. “We have to put safety first.”
Denise Hillery lost her sister, Mary Pettys, on Flight 3407.
“I can’t speak against the pilot. He lost his life. He has family, too,” she said. “What we want is stricter regulations from the FAA, public knowledge of [pilot] testing. There was not a lot of [flight] experience on the airplane.”
It is too cold—and way premature— to condemn a pilot and copilot who lost their lives, whose families suffer as much as any of the relatives of 48 other victims. Indeed, in a 2002 flight simulator test for NASA, more than half of 40 pilots were unable to recover a plane from the sort of ice-induced stall that might have afflicted Flight 3407. The pilots tested blamed a lack of proper training.
It is easier—and, I think, more accurate—to point the finger at the larger powers who put these pilots in the cockpit of this plane. That ranges from Pinnacle Air—which operates Colgan—to the often-maligned Federal Aviation Administration, which sets the rules.
When asked Tuesday about the readiness of Flight 3407’s pilots, Pinnacle spokesman Phil Reed said: “All the pilots we have at Colgan . . . have met or exceeded FAA standards.”
That may be true, as far as it goes, but it does not go far enough. The company said the FAA does not require training in the sort of “stick shaker” emergency that afflicted this plane. Odds are the crash that ended 50 lives will be chalked up to not one factor, but a combination of pilot error, training lapses and icy conditions.
But I keep thinking about all that we know now, three months later. And I keep wishing that all of those passengers had known, before boarding the airplane, just what they were stepping into.
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