SPECIAL REPORT: INVESTIGATING FLIGHT 3407
Low pay, fatigue 'recipe' for crash; Flight 3407 families outraged
WASHINGTON— The co-pilot’s low pay and brutal coast-to-coast commute were among the ingredients in “a recipe for an accident” that played itself out when Flight 3407 crashed into a home in Clarence Center, killing 50 people, a member of the National Transportation Safety Board said Wednesday.
The co-pilot of the Continental Connection flight, Rebecca L. Shaw, made about $16,000 in her first year at Colgan Air, the Continental contractor that operated the aircraft.
In addition, she lived near Seattle and commuted to her airline job in Newark, meaning that she took a red-eye flight to New Jersey on Feb. 12 to catch Flight 3407, testimony revealed.
And when she wasn’t sleeping on a plane, safety board officials said, she often slept in the pilot lounge in Newark, where she joked that one couch had her name on it.
Hearing those facts, safety board member Kathryn O’Leary Higgins was outraged.
“When you put together the commuting patterns, the pay levels, the fact that the crew rooms aren’t supposed to be used [for sleeping] but are being used — I think it’s a recipe for an accident, and that’s what we have here,” Higgins said.
A day after the hearings opened with a focus on the actions of the flight crew, attention turned Wednesday to the crew’s possible fatigue — and whether Colgan might have been responsible for it.
While earlier testimony revealed that the plane’s pilot, Capt. Marvin D. Renslow, responded incorrectly once the plane’s stall-warning system activated, Shaw’s actions are key, too.
When the pilot is flying the plane, the co-pilot is supposed to be watching the plane’s instruments — yet testimony Tuesday revealed that neither Renslow nor Shaw noticed as the plane’s speed slowed to the point where it would have difficulty remaining aloft.
Shaw, 24, flew 774 hours in her first year at Colgan. Roger Cox, a safety board aviation safety expert, said she earned $21 an hour, meaning that she would have been paid about $16,254 that year.
As a result, Shaw worked a second job in a Norfolk, Va., coffee shop when she started at Colgan, safety board witnesses said.
Once she was transferred from Colgan’s Norfolk operation to Newark, she chose to move back home to Seattle. Before reporting to work, she would sleep on cross-country commutes and in the crew room at the Newark airport, even though that is prohibited by company policy.
Asked how someone making $16,000 could live in Newark, Colgan’s vice president for operations, Harry Mitchel, said airline pilots for years had made do by sharing places. He said he viewed Colgan as a steppingstone for pilots looking to move up to a major carrier.
The airline — which later said that Shaw’s annual pay was $23,900 and that pilots on the largest plane flown make $67,000 — blamed Shaw, not her pay scale, for her schedule.
“It is their responsibility to commute in and be fit for duty,” said Mary Colgan Finnigan, vice president of administration for Colgan Air.
Higgins said Shaw was by no means the only Colgan crew member choosing to live far from work and commute to the home base.
Airlines have a long-standing policy that allows pilots to catch a ride on any airline with an empty seat to get back to where they need to be, and plenty of Colgan pilots appear to be utilizing that policy.
About 20 percent of Colgan pilots live more than 1,000 miles from their base airport, and an additional 14 percent live at least 400 miles from their base, Higgins said.
Renslow, 47, commuted to Newark from his home near Tampa, Fla., and, like Shaw, did not have a “crash pad” in Newark.
While it is unclear where he slept on the night before the crash, safety board documents show that he logged into Colgan’s computer network from the crew room at the Newark airport at 3 a. m. that day.
The Buffalo News reported last week that the Federal Aviation Administration is investigating possible pilot overscheduling at Colgan.
Higgins also grilled the Colgan executives over their hiring of Renslow, who had three failed FAA test flights before joining the airline but filed a job application listing only one of them.
Colgan executives said Renslow would not have been hired if they had known that he lied on his job application, and would have been fired if they had found out about that afterward Asked whether Renslow had “slipped under the radar” by getting hired at Colgan, Finnigan said: “I don’t think he slipped in under the radar.”
Mitchel said: “All I can say is Capt. Renslow was fully qualified to captain the aircraft. He had 16 months of a very fine track record with successful completion of six training and tracking events.”
Colgan also defended its hiring standards.
“My personal standard is, I would not sign off on any applicant that I personally would not want flying with my family in the back of an airplane,” Finnigan said.
Relatives and friends of the crash victims, sitting near the front of the auditorium, groaned when they heard Finnigan’s words.
“Oh, come on!” one voice cried out.
Safety board acting Chairman Mark V. Rosenker immediately interrupted the hearing, reminding audience members to respect the witnesses.
While defending its hiring practices, Colgan acknowledged that it has strengthened them in a way that would have disqualified someone as inexperienced as Renslow.
When Renslow was hired, the minimum number of flight hours to be considered for employment was 600 hours. But since the crash of Flight 3407, Colgan has boosted its minimum requirement for new pilots to 1,000 hours, Finnigan said.
That acknowledgment came a day after the transcript of the flight’s cockpit voice recorder showed Renslow saying he had only 625 hours of flying time when Colgan hired him.
“Oh wow,” Shaw replied. “That’s not much for, uh, back when you got hired.”
Such chatter after the plane had descended to below 10,000 feet violated federal rules on a “sterile cockpit,” and indicates that the crew might have been distracted while the aircraft was on the brink of disaster.
Colgan sought to push the blame for the crash on the two pilots.
“Capt. Renslow and First Officer Shaw did know what to do, had repeatedly demonstrated they knew what to do, but did not do it,” Colgan said in a statement. “We cannot speculate on why they did not use their training in dealing with the situation they faced.”
But witnesses at the hearing kept citing fatigue as a possible reason.
Shaw’s red-eye trip from the West Coast would be the type that could produce fatigue, said Dr. Tom Nesthus, an engineer research psychologist for the FAA.
“The general rule,” he said, “is it’s a lot easier to adapt to Western travel than it does Eastern travel.”
And when a pilot sleeps in a hotel — much less on a plane or on a couch in the crew room—“you don’t get the same quality of rest as in your own bed,” Nesthus said.
Pilots can suffer from lapses of attention and poor decisionmaking because of a lack of “situational awareness” that comes from being tired, Nesthus said.
That comes as no surprise to the safety board, which put narrower flight time and duty time limits for pilots on its list of most-wanted safety improvements in 1990.
Nesthus said the current anti-fatigue rules for pilots date from decades ago.
“My understanding,” he said, “is they were never based on science.”
He said a great deal of sleep research has been done in recent decades and it would be “beneficial” to incorporate them into the rules governing how much pilots can fly and how they can arrange schedules.
The safety board is expected to take a closer look at fatigue and distractions in the cockpit today, in its third and final day of hearings into the Flight 3407 tragedy.
This is occurring even though at least one member of the board says she has already heard enough.
“We all learn a lot from these accidents,” Higgins said. “In this case, we got more than we had hoped.”
Log into MyBuffalo to post a comment
MyBuffalo is the new social network from Buffalo.com. Your MyBuffalo account lets you comment on and rate stories at buffalonews.com. You can also head over to mybuffalo.com to share your blog posts, stories, photos, and videos with the community. Join now or learn more.
Reader comments