Families at hearing shaken by flight details
WASHINGTON — As Dana Hartman watched a simulation of Continental Connection Flight 3407, showing the plane rolling from side to side before crashing to the ground, she put herself in her father’s place.
“He traveled the world and was in two wars,” Hartman said of John Fiore, 60, a retired Air Force chief master sergeant who died in the crash. “He flew enough to know that it wasn’t just turbulence. That is what bothers me. He couldn’t be in denial.”
Nirmal Sidhu, whose 29-year-old son, Dipinder, also died in the crash, didn’t watch the simulation. She left the room when it came on the screen.
“I didn’t want to watch,” she said. “Maybe a few years from now. Maybe not ever.”
Tuesday was a difficult day for the families of Flight 3407 victims who attended the first federal hearings on the Feb. 12 crash. Not only were family members forced to confront the final moments of their loved ones’ lives, but they also heard testimony that the crew was ill prepared for the challenges of the flight and that the crash could have been prevented.
“In this case, based on your professional knowledge, the altitude of the aircraft, and the parameters it was operating in, do you believe this was a recoverable stall?” a National Transportation Safety Board member asked a Colgan Air flight instructor.
“My opinion, yes,” replied instructor Paul Pryor.
“I don’t like what I just heard,” Hartman said a few minutes later. “It took my breath away.”
Sitting in the first few rows of the vast hearing room, dozens of family members heard about the pilot’s spotty record and relative lack of experience on the turboprop plane that crashed just a few miles from Buffalo Niagara International Airport, killing 50 people.
The family members heard that the co-pilot apparently had limited sleep before the crash, having spent the night before flying to Newark, N.J., from her home in Seattle, and that the pilot had violated Colgan Airlines regulations banning pilots from sleeping in the crew room.
They heard that Colgan, the company that operated the Continental flight, didn’t begin giving its pilots hands-on training to recover from the type of stall that Flight 3407 experienced until after the crash occurred.
They heard a trained pilot should have been able to get the plane out of the stall, and they learned that even the crew had some doubts about their skills flying on a wintry night in the Northeast.
“I’ve never seen icing conditions,” first commander Rebecca Lynn Shaw tells Capt. Marvin Renslow on the flight voice recorder transcript. “I’ve never de-iced.”
Family members sitting in the hearing and reading the transcript from the flight voice recorder were shaken by much of the testimony.
“We are frustrated and hurt by what we saw and heard,” said Kevin Kuwik, whose girlfriend, Lorin Mauer, was killed in the crash. “I knew we would be hearing a lot of these things. You come in here expecting the worst.
“Anger is not going to help us get what we want at the end of the day,” he added, referring to a determination among family members to ensure that the crash of Flight 3407 leads to air safety improvements.
By the end of the daylong hearing, Kuwik said he was most struck by the crew’s almost total mishandling of the plane when it went into a stall.
He blamed Colgan, the operator of the aircraft, for not properly training its crew. He blamed the Federal Aviation Administration for not properly regulating the airline industry.
He was less critical of the pilot and first officer.
“I’m a basketball coach,” Kuwik said. “If I tell my guy to guard Michael Jordan and he can’t, it’s not his fault.”
Robin Tolsma, whose husband, Darren, died in the crash, said she was also struck by the lack of training the crew received.
“The pilots aren’t trained in stall recovery. [The pilot] did the opposite of what should have been done,” she said. “He seemed confused in the end.”
Tolsma noted that Tuesday was difficult for the families, starting with the flight simulation that left many family members shaken, as they put themselves in their loved ones’ place in those final minutes.
“I knew it was coming,” Hartman said. “You can either disengage or you put your loved one inside of it. When I first watched, I pictured my father and the other people. Then I tried to disengage so I could pay attention.”
Tolsma also watched the simulation twice.
“I watched it through tears,” she said, adding: “This was a tough day, but nothing will be tougher than the day Darren died. Nothing will trump that.”
But through the tears, she added, with her son and daughter standing next to her, will come change and improvements to air safety.
“I don’t want 11 more daughters to walk down the aisle without their fathers,” she said, looking at her teenage daughters. “That’s how many there are now.”
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