The National Transportation Safety Board has been holding a public hearing on the crash of Continental Connection flight 3407 that occurred on February 12, which crashed into a home in a suburb of Buffalo, New York.
The flight was operated by Colgan Air, Inc., based in Manassas, Virginia. Captain Marvin Renslow and First Officer Rebecca Shaw were the flight crew.
The panel has been investigating whether fatigue and low pay could have contributed to the accident. It has come out that Shaw was making only $16,200 per year and Renslow was making $50,000 per year — which is very low pay for the high-stress job that regional pilots have. Also, Renslow slept in the crewroom at the Newark airport the night before (against company policy) and Shaw commuted from Seattle, Washington the day before. Another issue was something called “sterile cockpit”, where there the flight crew is not supposed to talk about anything non-flight related under a certain altitude. According to the transcript, they were chatting quite a bit during final descent.
It is apparent this crew was ill-trained, and I can only fault the company for that. Renslow apparently only had 110 flight hours on the Bombardier Dash 8-Q400, which is the plane they were flying, and had not disclosed to Colgan that he had failed a few check rides prior to being hired. Again, this is the fault of the company for not doing a thorough background check on pilots.
It’s a terrible tragedy what happened, and I feel for all the families who lost loved ones. I hope this accident will shine a light on management of flight operators — especially the regional carriers — and force them to reevaluate their training methods and how the pilots are treated.
Source: Fox News
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