Colgan Air Crew Was Crash Waiting To Happen

If an engineering education teaches one anything, it's that proper process begets beneficial results. The reverse case is scarily evident in the transcripts of the Colgan Air disaster, where a discombobulated crew was a disaster, waiting to happen, which did.What can one say about an airline crew which, even in ideal flight circumstances, was probably on the margins of competency? It's precisely for such people that the concept of a "sterile cockpit" was created. Focus on the multitasks at hand, and not on extraneous [non-pertinent word deleted], and maybe, just maybe, you'll be able to checklist your way through to stability, if a mid-air wrinkle arises.

Not this crew.

As a long-time aviation buff, my first post-crash thought was one that's probably familiar to a lot of similarly inclined folks. Namely, I was hoping the NTSB wouldn't be so quick to scapegoat the crew. However, in listening to the transcript of the Feb. 12 crash, outside Buffalo, NY, of Colgan Air Flight 3407, the crew's culpability is glaringly obvious. So much so that it'll set back for a good decade the idea that safety investigators need to cast a really wide net before reflexively alluding to "pilot error," as they've historically been wont to do.

The thing that leaves one shaking one's head is that this isn't even a canonical case of "tunnel vision," where, if the Capt. Marvin Renslow and co-pilot Rebecca Shaw had mentally stepped back from the situation, they might've come up with the correct response. (Like if Swissair Flight 111 had landed expeditiously, rather than trying to dump fuel and stow cabin cutlery; though I realize it's a rare pilot who'd attempt to put down with full tanks. The pilot of the Air France Concorde which crashed following takeoff in Paris in 2000 presumably did "think different," since his in-flight decisions spared a serious number of ground casualities. And of course we have Sully, who combined application of procedure with gut instinct in a way we can only envy.)

There was no any of the time with Colgan, as you see in the cockpit transcript quoted below. Things devolved so quickly that the account of the conversation is devoid of "[non-pertinent word]," which is the reference used by the FAA in place of the epithets emanating from the crew as a plane proceeds to fall out of the sky.

I'm not sure if it's a fair assessment, but it's my belief in any case that what happened in Colgan was in some loose but direct way destined by Airline Deregulation Act of 1978. By this I mean that, in the old days, pilots used to be able to make a nice living. (OTOH, if you add up profits and losses of the airline business since the days of the Wright Brothers, it's never actually made a dime, but that's another story. For which you should read the works of John Newhouse.)

Nowadays, though, to be a pilot for a regional often means accepting the job even though it doesn't provide a real living. Which, I submit, weeds out a cohort you'd rather not lose. Into the vacuum come people who perhaps love flying with a passion which outstrips their skills set. On another day, in another cockpit, Renslow and Shaw would have bantered their way through to a bumpy but successful landing.

But procedures, and sterile cockpits, aren't there for the sunny day. (For non-aviation folks like you and me, this means putting the damn cellphone away while you're driving -- or using Bluetooth instead -- and backing up your hard drives. )

OK, now here are two portions of the transcript, which I downloaded from the National Transportation Safety Board site (as opposed to glomming off of the Wall Street Journal). The first show the crew's recognition that there's ice on the wings, but instead of acting on that information, they joke. The second snippet is the end game of the flight.

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