bbchien
Touchdown! Greaser!
Just like the two pilots that claimed they were not operating an aircraft (it was being tugged), what a crappy way to end a career....Dave Krall CFII said:
Unbelievable...
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Dave Krall CFII
Final Approach
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Dave Krall CFII SEL SES, Cmcl HELI
bbchien said:
Can/did autopsy show how hypoxic the PICs may have been ?
wsuffa
Touchdown! Greaser!
bbchien said:
Even if these guys had made it safely to the ground, their careers were over. Masks deployed, toasted engine, declared emergency....
Sigh.
I saw pictures on a website recently of a different CRJ that a Pinnacle (or other NW affiliated) crew landed very hard. Another plane shot to h#ll.
Houston, we have a problem.
Dave Krall CFII said:
Well, they put on O2 eventually, so it would have come up.
wsuffa said:
Back to my origional point, if you pay $25,000 for pilots, you are going to get $25,000 pilots. The planes are insured, so the company doesn't care. The people at risk are the passengers. There is a reason I don't get on commuter planes, I don't think they are operated safely, and that's one heck of a statement from an Ag pilot! I'll either rent a plane, or if moneys tight, rent a car.
wsuffa
Touchdown! Greaser!
Henning said:
I agree with point 1.
As for insurance, there is still revenue loss and other costs associated with the ship. Most companies retain a certain amount of risk to keep premiums to a reasonable level (what we know as the deductable). And then there is the publicity factor. Further, the cost of insurance goes up with each incident.
A company does care about those costs....
Auburn_CFI
Pre-takeoff checklist
Henning said:
I think you may be a little extreme here. For one, many pilots are willing to work for $25,000 because they enjoy flying and they believe that the end justifies the means. They see the low paying first few years as "worth it" because it will get better if they stick it out. Secondly, I believe that refusing to get on a commuter flight is also a little extreme. Thousands of passengers fly on commuter airlines everyday, safely. You are entitled to your own opinion obviously, but I would refrain from saying that airlines do not care about safety because their planes are insured or leading the general public to believe that commuter planes or regional airliners are unsafe. To make a statement like that is simply untrue and has no factual basis. Unfortunately the average person would believe you because you are a pilot, because of this fact we should all be responsible with our comments. Are some pilots wreckless, absolutely. The two in the case being discussed were grossly wreckless and careless, but this was an isolated event. It should not be over generalized as a problem with the regional airline industry.
wsuffa said:
Not much, if it gets to big, the board will declare bankruptcy, rape the coffers and take what's there as bonuses, and close the doors screwing the stockholders. What amazes me is that they get to do it over and over. It's the same people that start and bankrupt these operations over the past few decades. It just comes down to bad management, and it starts at the very top.
wsuffa
Touchdown! Greaser!
Henning said:
Well, there is a bunch of that. It's part of the reason that investors demand higher returns. And it IS part of the lease rates they have to pay (most of those planes are leased).... when AA bought TWA the effective interest rate went down by something like 30%.
There are plenty of folks in plenty of industries (some homebuilders come to mind) that operate in the very same fashion. But they tend not to have as many lives hanging in the balance.
Auburn_CFI said:
You raise a valid point, and the 22-even 30 year old commuter pilots don't bother me as much because even though they are low time, they are on their way up shooting for the brass ring of the heaviest of the heavies because that's where the money is. That's ok with me, they're young and have dillussions with stories of old A-Scale pilots paychecks which no longer exist. The ones that bother me are the 40-55 year old guys working for that. They'll never see the majors again even if they've been there before. Those are the peak earning years of your life, how bad did you *&(^ up in life to be here driving a bus for less money than a Greyhound driver makes, heck, the City Bus driver makes 2-3 times your salary and is home every night. And I don't buy "for the lifestyle" one bit. The lifestyle of a commuter pilot ain't so hot once you have a family.
Auburn_CFI said:
You have your opinion, I have mine. When I say I think the commuter airline industry is a bloody hazard, I'm serious. I think that from the boardroom down, they are operated as cheap as you can possibly get away with, cheapest aircrews, maintenance crews, vendors... cheap as you can get, and you always get what you pay for.
bbchien
Touchdown! Greaser!
Frank Lorenzo proved that there is always somebody who will do it for cheaper. Until the public demans more, that is what we will get. Cheaper.
Unfortunately there is no search engine for safety (which IS an attitude) and amenities. Only for price. And, that's what drives the whole engine. Cheap.
Did I forget to say, "Cheap"?
John J
Line Up and Wait
Henning said:
Henning
I could not agree more. I guess I am in the "old category' my first flying job I made 2.90 an hour as a copilot flying yes 6 nights a week on a Beech 18. I had just got out of the service as a young pilot at 22. I knew even then I could not fly the big stuff for my eyes were not qualified for a class one. I am lucky for my skipper was retired from the airlines having started his flying career in the 1920s. We flew tired airplanes and that was under part 95 just before part 135 rules. We had rules and rules above and beyond what was needed. We had cockpit management even in those days. We never even considered trying to "out fly" the plane and its requirements.
We even when, the weather or the plane had "questions" that were beyond us we would load the mail on a truck and get it to the next destination. The management never even question our decisions.
Today I will rent a car if I feel "uneasy" for not long ago I got the pleasure of flying a commuter out of BOS to SYR and yup we did a "Skim By" of a large TS. It was the only TS on the route and yup it was not fun. Ever see a Sabb 340 do a dance of wings banking through + or- 70 degrees and the nose dancing up and down throuh 30 degrees. What was even more amazing was who ever up front said, "Hang on, we will be out of this in a few minutes" Yup it was a scare, and I was scared. If the pilot had moved another 5 miles to either the right or left it would have been fine, but he had to take the edge of the storm to "make time". I asked him why at the end of the flight and he just brushed it off as "well these things are not forecast" It is another lesson learned. Today I rent a lot of cars or take the train.
John J
Last edited:
Ed Guthrie
Cleared for Takeoff
bbchien said:
One need only ask this question:
When a pilot hiring boom is upon us, and the commuters find themselves competing with the majors who are snapping up every qualified pilot, the commuters could compete in two different manners. A. The commuters could increase salaries to the point where the commuters could effectively steal quality pilots from the majors, or B. The commuters could lower their flight experience standards until the pilot training quota is filled with whatever pilot experience dregs remain.
When the next pilot hiring boom cycle starts, which choice, A or B, do the commuters choose every single time?
bbchien said:
That's the problem, the public wants cheaper, there's always someone out there trying to undercut the industry. Hell, the majors are price warring themselves into bankruptcy. I still think the worst thing that happened to the airlines was deregulation. We could have brought the cost of air travel down and increased usage without going to the extremes that have happenned. What the consumer demands, the consumer gets. Oh well...
wsuffa
Touchdown! Greaser!
Henning said:
Well, the airlines have certainly done their share to commoditize transportation. As one airline said "we're not selling service, we're selling you a way to get from A to B however we can". So be it.
Commodities are always a race based on cost alone.
TangoWhiskey
Touchdown! Greaser!
wsuffa said:
Page 19 (last page) of that report says that the fuel analysis (taken from the fuel filters) indicates insufficient anti-ice compounds in the fuel... if they weren't flight planned to be up that high, they might not have had enough anti-ice alcohol added to the fuel. You think maybe the diesel became too thick to burn?
Troy Whistman said:
That would still fall under the heading of "moron induced failure".
Skip Miller
Final Approach
The Flame goes out. The engines have stopped producing thrust.AdamZ said:
Others will know more on this one than I.
I think you mean "compressor stall"
If the air is not flowing smoothly through the engine, the compressor can create a complete vacuum which disrupts the flow further. When the engine "eats" the bubble of vacuum it creates the bangs you heard. Some compressor stalls are quite violent and require an engine teardown, others are benign.
I was taking off on a 727, coincidentally from BDL, many years ago in a strong gusty crosswind. We rolled about 30 feet from power up, when BANG BANG BANG. Engines to idle, feet on brakes. After explaining what happened to us pax, we then commenced the takeoff roll with the two outboard engines only. About 1/2 way down the runway, the third engine was brought up to takeoff power. The pilot wanted to reduce the crosswind component of the airflow into the center engine, which decreased the possibility of another compressor stall.
If the pilots were horsing the plane around at FL41 they may well have induced a compressor stall, but that is just a guess.
-Skip
wsuffa
Touchdown! Greaser!
Troy Whistman said:
Could be. I'd still put that in the category of pilot error.... not mechanical.
Jeff Oslick
Final Approach
Henning said:
While the actions of these pilots are truly incomprehensible, I have trouble pegging the whole commuter airline structure with the imprint of this accident. As GA pilots, we all have (or should have) a pretty good understanding of risk. I have a very hard time claiming that someone should be afraid to fly on a commuter flight when the alternatives are:
1) Driving a long distance on an interstate highway, which is demonstrably more dangerous than commuter airline flying - I feel safer riding in an aluminum, two-jet powered tube with a 25 (or 45) year old 1,500 hour pilot as PIC than driving 1 foot away from a 17 year old talking on a cell phone and drinking coffee at 75 mph or next to a trucker in a marginally-maintained 80,000 lb rig who has been driving for the last 8 hours straight (or more).
2) Flying yourself in a GA plane. I will grant you that there are many (but I doubt most, and I include myself in the "doubt" part) here on the forum that are highly experienced, cautious pilots flying extremely well maintained planes. You are more the exception than the rule. I may be very cautious, but I'm not very experienced (to me, the comm pilot and intrument ratings I have mean nothing until I truly have the experience to back up the paper), and I may do what I can to maintain my plane, but it is still fairly new to me and I try to maintain a certitude that it will try to kill me at the slightest provocation (read: it's new to me and I don't trust it 100% yet, 98% maybe, but not 100%).
For the majority (possibly, very large majority) of us here, IMHO, we would be fooling ourselves to think that flying ourselves is safer than flying on a commuter airline flight. I may be more fun, and may be more convenient, and we would certainly feel more in control, but reality is different than that perception.
fire away...
Jeff
Auburn_CFI
Pre-takeoff checklist
Jeff Oslick said:fire away...
Jeff
Jeff,
You have the right idea. Do not worry about what other people may say in response to your post. Simply put, there is absolutely no factual basis to the claim that the regional airline industry is in any way unsafe. I do think that you will see a lot of people who do not like seeing young pilots.. This is probably the reason they hate the regional airlines, which is just ridiculous. The regional airlines are exponentially safer than Part 91 and Part 135 operators and by all means safer than driving.
Jeff Oslick said:2) Flying yourself in a GA plane. I will grant you that there are many (but I doubt most, and I include myself in the "doubt" part) here on the forum that are highly experienced, cautious pilots flying extremely well maintained planes. You are more the exception than the rule. I may be very cautious, but I'm not very experienced (to me, the comm pilot and intrument ratings I have mean nothing until I truly have the experience to back up the paper), and I may do what I can to maintain my plane, but it is still fairly new to me and I try to maintain a certitude that it will try to kill me at the slightest provocation (read: it's new to me and I don't trust it 100% yet, 98% maybe, but not 100%).
For the majority (possibly, very large majority) of us here, IMHO, we would be fooling ourselves to think that flying ourselves is safer than flying on a commuter airline flight. I may be more fun, and may be more convenient, and we would certainly feel more in control, but reality is different than that perception.
fire away...
Jeff
Just a question, what makes you think that when you are getting on a commuter plane you are getting " highly experienced, cautious pilots flying extremely well maintained planes.",'cause it ain't so. You are getting the cheapest pilots and maintenance that the law will allow.
Auburn_CFI said:
You can't compare getting into a commuter plane with driving on the highway, if you want to do that kind of comparison, you'd have to compare riding a Greyhound bus with flying on a commuter plane.
poadeleted3
Pattern Altitude
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Henning said:
Why? That is an irrelevant comparison, because I am not going to ride a Greyhound. On the trip I recently took, I had three travel choices: I could drive my car, I could fly myself, or I could fly commuter airlines. Which of those three is the safest?
How safe Greyhound is doesn't matter, because it's not a method we'll use. Insisting on including Greyhound is as pointless as including travel via Amish buggy.
Auburn_CFI
Pre-takeoff checklist
Henning said:
This is simply a totally false statement. There is no factual basis to this claim whatsoever. Please let us know how many times you have visited and inspected the maintenance facilities of any regional airline. Please let us know how many en route checks you have performed on regional airline pilots. This was an isolated event. I had lunch with two inspectors from my FSDO yesterday, both of them conduct these type of inspections, particularly en route inspections, and spoke very highly of the regional airlines.
As far as your comment about comparing flying and driving, I am not sure what you meant by that post. You were the one who stated you would rather drive than fly on a regional airline, please see your earlier posts, and this is why we mentioned the driving.
Joe Williams said:
Because the comparison is a statistical one, and when doing such comparisons, you have compare apples with apples.
Auburn_CFI said:
I've worked as pilot for one, that is where I base my statement, I keep my eyes open and talk to the maint crews.
As to the driving comment, you are making an improper statistical comparison. I have not been involved in an accident on the roads in over a million miles, because I am in control of the vehicle and drive in such a way that I can compensate for completely untrained and unscreened idiots on the road. A mechanical failure in a car or truck most likely won't end in an accident for me. A mechanical failure in a plane typically leaves me upside down in a field.
Auburn_CFI
Pre-takeoff checklist
Henning said:
I hardly think being a pilot qualifies anyone to make such statements as you have made here. Perhaps if you were a pilot who worked as an inspector for the FAA or NTSB your remarks would carry validity. Like I said in the beginning, this is about misinforming the general public. Because this is turning into a meaningless debate with little factual basis I will no longer respond to this thread, it is going no where. I do feel sorry for the crew of Pinnacle 3701, but they were being completely unprofessional and reckless and I hope everyone learns from their mistakes. Will I fly on Pinnacle Airlines? Absolutely, twice last week.
Jeff Oslick
Final Approach
Henning said:
I never said commuter pilots were necessarily highly experienced and cautious. That part of my comment was only in reference to the relative few pilots who have those quals and who have very carefully maintained and capable aircraft who might be able to achieve the same level of safety as the commuter airlines. The (vast) majority of GA pilots and planes do not meet this criteria. The commuter airlines (and the majors) acheive their safety record by using (and almost always following) very strict rules for how to fly and maintain their planes - far stricter than GA. This overcomes, as demonstrated by the statistics, what you and others may perceive as deficiencies in the experience and judgement of some of their pilots.
And I am very glad that you have a very good driving record, but you DO NOT have control over what other drivers do. My mother and sister-in-law were both nearly killed (separate accidents) by reckless, and at least one of them was drunk, drivers who ran red lights on suburban streets at very high speed where there is no way even the most cautious of drivers would have not gotten hit.
I am not going to argue with you about comparing riding on a bus. I disagree with your opinion on the validity of the comparison, and I am sure I will not be able to convince you otherwise.
Jeff
bbchien
Touchdown! Greaser!
Not to take sides here, but I think it is possible to "pay for training" and bypass the selection processes at the 121 entry level- that would characterize the captain of the FL41 club. But when you get to the majors, that's no longer possible. By that level, bad comments, down-rating evaluations, which now by law have to be shared upon request of the new potential employer, all come into play. It tends to select out against precisely the sort of joyriding "hey dude" that unfortunately died here; tightened up the insurance pool, raised my rates, increased the cost of my 121 fare, and fortunately didn't hurt a paying passenger.
Not everyone is this way, not even majority.
My 13 year aviation mentee, now 27, now a right seat pilot at Am Eagle, related a few years ago, a hard lesson. Seems an ERAU benefactor's son had not made progress with five instructors, and she was given him as a problem case. She knew what was at stake. Ten additional hours later, she reported to her chief CFI that the kid was just not meant to be PIC. As a result she was moved to the bottom of the Seminole instructor list for a year. This really cost her- as she would have been hired the summer prior to 9/11 had this not happened. But, she did good: she did the right thing, at considerable economic cost. She's tough, she's from Peoria.
Not everyone is this way, not even majority.
My 13 year aviation mentee, now 27, now a right seat pilot at Am Eagle, related a few years ago, a hard lesson. Seems an ERAU benefactor's son had not made progress with five instructors, and she was given him as a problem case. She knew what was at stake. Ten additional hours later, she reported to her chief CFI that the kid was just not meant to be PIC. As a result she was moved to the bottom of the Seminole instructor list for a year. This really cost her- as she would have been hired the summer prior to 9/11 had this not happened. But, she did good: she did the right thing, at considerable economic cost. She's tough, she's from Peoria.
Ed Guthrie
Cleared for Takeoff
bbchien said:
Everything you mention above is available (by law) to the Part 121 commuter operator, too. However, in the case of the accident here, and in many other cases, it has been shown that the commuter operator is apparently more willing to overlook these items than the major carrier. Hence one basis for the comments that the commuters are less safe--despite having the same information available the commuter system either fails to or choose not to weed out the dregs.
Auburn_CFI said:
Look, no offense to ya dude, if you want to believe that the commuters are being managed properly, that's fine, work your way through them, but please, do the freakin job right, make sure everything you do is right, and you'll be with the majors in hopefully 5 years. It's still a good living there even if it ain't what it used to be.
Am I biased, you betcha, I lost a good buddie because managment at AE allowed a guy who had 4 pinks, one from them, 3 at Com Air to serve as Captain/PIC and kill my friend as well as a cabin full of Pax. Look up Raliegh Durham American Eagle Jetstream crash. The problem is, having these guys in the cockpit of commuter aircraft is NOT uncommon, I personnally know about 150 airline pilots, probably 100 of them are ex military pilots, I don't have any trouble flying with them but they all fly for the majors. Out of the rest, 15 of them I wouldn't get into an airplane with without a set of controls in front of me, their airmanship is that sloppy and attitude so swaggared.
There is a mindset that you have to have as Captain of anything, and that is you have to know EVERYTHING about the craft you are in command of, know it cold, so you know how and why everything that happens does, and you can't get Drunk, ever. Didn't say can't drink, just not Drunk, too much forgetting there.
You have to put an effort into it, a real effort. You have the responsability of EVERYONES life on board. Good enough doesn't cut the grade, need excellent every time. That level of dedication and ability is worth a lot of money on the open market. I just don't see that level of dedication to the job, I just don't see it, and I look for it all the time. The problem lies in the pay scale, the guys who stay in the commuters, 65% by my estimate after 5 years, is that they have no where else to go. Out of those my estimate 20% have no where else to go because they are just too bloody dense. It's just that after all this time and all this training, they can manage to "Do good enough" after their 10 or more hours of recurrent in the box. If you don't pay well, you don't keep the best help which leaves you too many "good enoughs". The best either move up to the majors or move out to other fields.
The level of safety with the airlines, and this is even starting to creap into the majors now, is mostly due to the quality of the aircraft and engines being produced today.
When you say "Some just want to be pilots and sacrafice the money for that life", ask the question "why?" Why would they do that? What exactly is the motivating factor? The answers may scare you, they do me.
Dave Krall CFII
Final Approach
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Display name:
Dave Krall CFII SEL SES, Cmcl HELI
Last I reviewed the general stats in Nall's Report, it seemed commercial flying was as safe per hour or slightly safer than driving, with private piloting of aircraft enduring about twice as many injuries/fatalities as commercial per hour flown. There will ALWAYS be a few exceptions in all PIC categories, no matter how much reasonable screening or flight training is done.
An interesting sub-group is flight instruction, which as I recall enjoys the same accident percentages as other commercial flying but, upon cursory statistical reflection of accidents per hour of the numerous flight training maneuvers done in often unbroken succession, is actually phenomenally safe when compared to a typical GA flight of a relatively uneventful cruise leg/legs punctuated by, or little more than, a traffic pattern and LDG/TO maneuvers.
Statistics can be cruel. The abovementioned misguided Greyhound bus is alas, obviously a menace to ALL who travel by almost any means and all buses of any kind should be avoided at all costs, but especially as a passenger (BTW: proof that Hell exists, if not on the Greyhound itself then certainly in its terminal).
An interesting sub-group is flight instruction, which as I recall enjoys the same accident percentages as other commercial flying but, upon cursory statistical reflection of accidents per hour of the numerous flight training maneuvers done in often unbroken succession, is actually phenomenally safe when compared to a typical GA flight of a relatively uneventful cruise leg/legs punctuated by, or little more than, a traffic pattern and LDG/TO maneuvers.
Statistics can be cruel. The abovementioned misguided Greyhound bus is alas, obviously a menace to ALL who travel by almost any means and all buses of any kind should be avoided at all costs, but especially as a passenger (BTW: proof that Hell exists, if not on the Greyhound itself then certainly in its terminal).
bbchien
Touchdown! Greaser!
bbchien said:
Yep, that's the one.
