Originally Posted by
Hachiko
And the Qs are very comfortable!
It's a bunch of nonsense. If you wanted to avoid "unsafe" airlines then you'd have to avoid them all. Hell, look at ValuJet, now Airtran, soon to be Southwest.
The pilots on 3407 made a mistake which unfortunately cost passenger lives. But you know what? Any pilot could make that mistake. Any pilot could foolishly spend an entire day getting to work, catch a nap in the crew room, and then operate a flight (oh, if only you knew how often this happens). Colgan isn't great but neither is ExpressJet, United, American, Skywest... Everywhere has bad apples. Any flight could go down. The uproar over Colgan Air is ridiculous. The problems at Colgan are at EVERY airline. You think a 30 year captain doesn't have a crash pad or nap in the crew room? Think again.
Regarding "any pilot could make that mistake." Maybe ... but probably not. Pilots make mistakes but the one that caused that crash is pretty hard for an airline pilot to understand. Stall training is as basic as you can get. You don't pull up and add power if the airplane starts to stall. That's what they did and you're pretty much guaranteed you will you to crash if you do that. It couldn't be more opposite to what you're supposed to do in that situation. RIP to the passengers and crew but the Captain also lied on his application to Colgan and had multiple checkride failures on his record. He probably would not have been hired had he been honest on his application. There may be a few guys out there flying with records like he had but you're not going to be flying on airlines with a Captain or First Officer who failed three FAA checkrides, your initial checkride to be a First Officer, and your initial checkride to upgrade to Captain like he did. There's something wrong if you've got that many failures under your belt and you're an airline pilot.