At the same time, the 1,500-hour rule may have had some indirect safety benefits by empowering pilots to push back on commercial pressure. There is not much evidence linking flight hours to accidents and there likely never will be, because pilots and flight experience are infinitely variable. Yet, this narrow focus on pilot flight time as a proxy for safety misses the principal lessons of the Colgan crash. With regionals now pushing for changes or exemptions to the rule, a heated but largely philosophical discussion has arisen over what makes for a “good” airline pilot, and how flight time maps to safety outcomes. Mandated by Congress, the Federal Aviation Administration rule dramatically increased experience requirements for Part 121 airline first officers, disrupting a business model that had previously exploited an ample supply of low-time pilots. regional airlines struggle to hire enough pilots. The so-called “1,500-hour rule” was not the only piece of rulemaking to come out of the Colgan crash, but it is the one that is now receiving the most attention as U.S. “Oh wow,” the first officer replied, “that’s not much.” These seemingly incriminating words may explain why an accident that occurred with two reasonably high-time pilots at the controls became the impetus for keeping low-time pilots out of airline cockpits. “As a matter of fact I got hired with about 625 hours here,” he said. The captain who was about to make an unfathomable mistake - repeatedly pulling aft on the control column as the stick shaker and stick pusher activated in turn, rather than pushing forward - replied that he didn’t even have 1,600 hours when he came on board (he was then up to around 3,400). Related: Pilot shortage solutions are plentiful but politically improbable In a damning public transcript of the cockpit voice recorder, families of the victims of Flight 3407 could read how the first officer, as she watched ice form on the wings and windshield, remarked on how little exposure she had received to icing and actual instrument meteorological conditions in the 1,600 hours of flight time she had logged before coming to Colgan (she had over 2,200 hours at the time of the crash). But it so happened that the content of their conversation was tragically poignant and, ultimately, highly consequential. The National Transportation Safety Board determined that the captain, by enabling the conversation, created an environment that impeded timely error detection, contributing to his startled and inappropriate response to stick shaker activation a few minutes later.īoth pilots were fatigued, and any extraneous conversation at that point probably would have posed the same deadly distraction. The aircraft was just a few thousand feet over the ground at the time, well below the level at which sterile cockpit procedures should have taken effect. The stage for the current debate over airline pilot qualifications was set in a darkened cockpit over western New York on the night of February 12, 2009.įive minutes before the Colgan Air Bombardier Q400 operating as Continental Connection Flight 3407 stalled and crashed while on approach to Buffalo-Niagara International Airport, killing all 49 people on board and one person on the ground, the captain and first officer were deep into a conversation that had nothing to do with the task at hand.
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