Who's flying your airplane? (The Buffalo News)

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You are sitting in a 50-seat propeller plane heading home to Buffalo, and out the window you see ice on the wings. Ten rows in front of you, someone else also may be encountering mid-air icing for the first time: Your co-pilot.

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Skiles lays the smack down.

Skiles, for instance, noted talk in the aftermath of the Buffalo crash of another early warning system being placed in planes to warn pilots of impending stalls.

"This is just something to compensate for putting people in the pilot seats that shouldn't be there in the first place," he said.
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Lots of the comments section aren't too kind to the 3407 crew or Colgan. Of course, hindsight is always great to have, if we could always have it before anything happened :rolleyes:

They (Colgan) could have realized that the weather was too treacherous and that their pilots weren't up to dealing with icing and just canceled the flight.
And, finally, what kind of people are these pilots anyway, who would take an aircraft up knowing that they don't know what they are doing and laugh about it?

Many a pilot in training has said, "Hey the weather is too bad, I'm not flying today." Now, I'm sure that if the Pilot in Charge on this fatefull flight to Buffalo had wanted to scrub the flight that night Colgain would have been mad about it.
But, still. If you are a pilot and you don't know what you are doing and you are in over your head, you have a MORAL responsiblity to not fly.
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But this comment does have truth IMO

The public wants to pay bus type fares for a plane ticket and then expects excellent pilots.
It can't be done. It costs a small fortune to fly and maintain and aircraft. It costs a small fortune for simulator training and so on.
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I like this guy:

"I fly only national name bran carriers and no local airlines.
When I do have to fly a short hop, I fly only on private chartered NewJets."

Who or what is a "NewJet?"

It's likely this guy can't tell a 737 from an E-175 so how is he to know whether he's flying on a "name bran carrier" or a regional?
 
This guy has it 100% right:

"The public doesn't want to pay for quality, safe service.
They want cheap carriers and cheap airfares, and never mind the fact that your getting a cheap bargain basement ill trained pilot as well.
Your neighborhood pharmacist, dentist, doctor, teacher or lawyer, gets far better training than the average pilot.
With New York State licensure for these professionals, there are strict standards.
Pilots could have an excellent profession the way it used to be, but thanks to de-regulation that is not the case anymore. We all want to fly on the cheap and don't seem to care if the plane is safe or not."
 
Patrick said:
I like this guy:

"I fly only national name bran carriers and no local airlines.
When I do have to fly a short hop, I fly only on private chartered NewJets."

Who or what is a "NewJet?"

It's likely this guy can't tell a 737 from an E-175 so how is he to know whether he's flying on a "name bran carrier" or a regional?
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Easy. He only flies on carriers that keep a regular schedule. ;)
 
I am so sick and tired of articles and news headlines like this coming out of the blue. The only reason they do this is money and to keep the flying public scared. If people are not satisfied, drive from NYC to LAX.
 
Pilotwannabe1123 said:
I am so sick and tired of articles and news headlines like this coming out of the blue. The only reason they do this is money and to keep the flying public scared. If people are not satisfied, drive from NYC to LAX.
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Well, it's not necessarily "out of the blue", it's an RSS newsfeed! :)
 
Pilotwannabe1123 said:
I am so sick and tired of articles and news headlines like this coming out of the blue. The only reason they do this is money and to keep the flying public scared. If people are not satisfied, drive from NYC to LAX.
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I wouldn't say thats the only reason. I mean, there are legit problems that do need both highlighting as well as solutions.
 
these guys never know what they are talking about, especially Tom Castello, who NEVER knows what the hell he is talking about. Take a look at this, he is suppose to an airline/ aviation and aerodynamic expert.

[YT]<object width="320" height="265"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/4sz_W-pwWNk&hl=en_US&fs=1&color1=0x402061&color2=0x9461ca&hd=1"></param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/4sz_W-pwWNk&hl=en_US&fs=1&color1=0x402061&color2=0x9461ca&hd=1" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="320" height="265"></embed></object>[/YT]
 
MikeD said:
I wouldn't say thats the only reason. I mean, there are legit problems that do need both highlighting as well as solutions.
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I do agree that there are things that need to be changed in the industry, but its so much negativity within the media. I know a lot of people who don't fly on the mere fact of what they hear on the news. Also every air incident has to be from a regional airline.
 
It is hard to take anonymous sources seriously when there are quotes like this:

"The ability to recover, so if a plane flips upside down, you can recover," said a former senior safety board accident investigator, who spoke on condition of anonymity.
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I highly doubt that a former senior safety board accident investigator would use the term 'flip'.
 
Codyjp said:
It is hard to take anonymous sources seriously when there are quotes like this:



I highly doubt that a former senior safety board accident investigator would use the term 'flip'.
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He was just putting it in layman's terms.....:D
 
Pilotwannabe1123 said:
these guys never know what they are talking about, especially Tom Castello, who NEVER knows what the hell he is talking about. Take a look at this, he is suppose to an airline/ aviation and aerodynamic expert.

[YT]4sz_W-pwWNk[/YT]
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I think the fact that this airplane was confused for a regional jet says something.

This is also part of the reason why I never watch the news....
 
I was on a run this morning and saw this one. It's in big oogitty booggidy letters on the front page, with a picture of some airline's "big jet" sim.

It seems like The News does this every month or so. The bill was in the news a couple weeks ago, so I don't see the correlation to today's story. All of the articles have the same tone, too. There's nothing new. It certainly isn't first page stuff, if it's newsworthy at all.

It's Buffalo. Slow news city, slow news day = pull old news. They do this every week with the state budget, and every month with that basketball player who took the city's money to manage a restaurant into the ground.
 
THis was the front page of today's paper. I believe it is going to be a four or five part expose of regional airlines.
 
coa787 said:
I think the fact that this airplane was confused for a regional jet says something.
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Someone took CNN reporting seriously.
That same someone felt the need to make a youtube video to nitpick aircraft identification, a most trivial of things.
Someone else felt said video was of enough value to be posted here.
I, in turn, became annoyed enough to post this.

That all says something.

Pullup, you from Buffalo?
 
In fairness to the traveling public, let's think before we vilify them for wanting (needing) to travel but not wanting (able) to pay high fares. It is unlikely there is a pilot alive who hasn't owned a small car at one time or another. Often money drives that decision rather than a desire to spend time on the highway looking up at the door handles of other vehicles. Besides, if the public could afford to pay high fares for the best, there wouldn't be any airlines.
 
I really liked the article.


It seemed well researched and fairly unbiased. That's really what we need here.. Show the public the truth. If that doesn't spur change, we failed as experts in our profession in educating the ignorant.
 
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