The Juice

Sarcasm, sure.....

galaxy flyer

First, withholding material evidence from the Board is obstruction, a legally actionable issue. The Board could have them civilly or criminally liable. You cannot lie or withhold evidence when the government comes calling in an investigation and that doesn't only apply in criminal cases.

Second, having been found to doubts about the captain, what are they going to say in rebuttal--we didn't mean it.

Dicovery is a powerful tool, gigabytes of emails were no doubt downloaded. The plaintiff attorneys found the key to proving the company liable for wrongful death.

GF.

USMCFLYR

Mod note:
OK - enough with the backhanded namecalling and things like "junior" and "tropper"
That stuff just leads down the wrong path and off target.

USMCFLYR

jayray2

So are they going to go after Pinnacle or Continental? Has Continental pretty much washed their hands clean of this?

JungleBus

Last I heard they were trying to go after Continental too, the judge recently ruled they could have access to Continental pilot records (to prove that Colgan pilots were less qualified than mainline). There was a thread about it recently.

spitfire

Skyhigh,
Those are good points, but I'm hardly a risk taker. Moving from place to place is common in most professions, also in aviation. Flying 135, 91 and 121 has given me a lot more experience than I would have gained had I gone from flight instructing directly to flying an RJ or something. But I think you may be right about everything else. FWIW, I prefer flying 121, but at that time of my life just couldn't deal with the pay/schedule. Ironically, the first two years at Colgan were pretty good. At any rate, this is probably the only industry that pays you crap, treats you like crap and then gets indignant when you leave.

spitfire

Yup. That's exactly the world we live in. Even if I amass 10,000 or 15,000 hours of flying, flew some Shuttle missions, was Blue Angel commander, etc., etc., that would probably come up if anything ever happened.

I understand the media are generally stupid concerning aviation, the problem is the lawyers. They're the ones who force the airlines (and other employers) to live in some kind of fantasy world where simple answers are proposed in lieu of examining real issues.

One example of that is how you hear a lot about MR's checkride history and his lack of experience in the Q. But you don't hear anything about his copilot's clean checkride history and that she had something like 700 hours in type.

The whole reason this thread began was because of the discovery of Bill Honan's e-mails voicing his doubts about Renslow's capability to be PIC. I think that is far more damning in a legal sense than MR's failures, although I can't figure out how somebody with so many 121 stumbles made it into the left seat.

If you were to study the backgrounds of the pilots involved in every crash in the last 20 or 30 years, how many of them would have had perfect check ride histories? I would guess that many of them were perfect or almost perfect. So it can't really be a factor can it? What about attitude, nonchalance and get-there-itis? Look at American 1420: it's happened because the pilots insisted on flying through a TS to land at Little Rock instead of holding for a few minutes to let the storm pass. That was a judgement issue, pure and simple, and completely unrelated to training records. I could bore you with more examples.

There's just more to flying than what you did in primary training. But despite that, I understand it's easier to sift out people through a simple metric than think too much about their entire experience. Another thing is quite simply that as long as there are enough guys with no busts on their records, the airlines don't have too much reason to interview someone like me, despite the absurdity of the fact that I've already done the job.

If anything, I'm more paranoid and anal about those kinds of things BECAUSE of my failures. The whole thing mystifies me. I can name dozens of historical examples of people who stumbled and fell early in their career and then went on to be competent professionals.

If the regionals were the Constitutional Congress, they wouldn't have picked some guy named George Washington to lead their army because he lost a garrison and was captured with his troops during the French and Indian War in the 1750s.

If they were Abraham Lincoln, they wouldn't have picked some dude named Ulysses Grant to lead the Union armies because he had quit the army in the 1850s after a mediocre career and then went on to fail in repeated business ventures.

Maybe in today's media/legal climate, the president couldn't promote a guy like Grant because CNN would dig up all the rumors about his drinking, etc.

It raises interesting questions about the state of our culture when people (lawyers) who know nothing about a profession (military, aviation, medicine etc.) nevertheless have a huge impact on it.

spitfire

Thanks for the kind words. I'm looking at some 135/91 stuff where I live in the DC area, but it's slim pickings. Maybe it's time to fly acro for fun and get a "real" job.

brianb

No B.S. on this one I'm afraid. The same thing USE to happen at the local airport that I instructed at. The Examiner would schedule up to 4 checkrides during the day and while he was administrating the practical to one fella, the other was planning out his long cross country!! They FAA finally shut him down.

727574drvr

"Thou shalt maintain thy airspeed, lest the ground come up and smyth thee".