This post does not have much to do with progressive politics, except that I believe that the progressive side of the spectrum supports being intelligent.
Early this last year, there was a terrible crash in Buffalo, New York. The NTSB discovered that the crash was a result of significant ice build-up on the wings of the aircraft. Many people died and were injured as a result of that crash.*
But, as a another result of that crash, the House immediately sprang into action to “Do Something”. They Must Make Aviation Safer!** So they created the “Aviation Safety Bill” H. R. 3371; a sweeping piece of legislation, and by an overwhelming majority passed it. Now it’s shipped off to the Senate, and they are the only hope to block it. And this is a bill to be blocked. Most of the stuff is actually a pretty good idea- for example, it basically kills overnight quick turns. It is currently pretty standard practice to have a pilot fly somewhere, and get 8 hours between their last flight, to when they need to be back in the morning at the airport. That sounds like enough to sleep, right? Except that you have to include the time to drive to and from the airport to the hotel, wind-down time, and getting ready in the morning and being at the airport early enough to inspect the plane. Then, all of a sudden, that 8 hours of sleep is more like 5. Having pilots that are more rested and awake will certainly make aviation safer.
There is also the redundant in this bill- such as the “pre-employment screening” of prospective pilots. It’s true that there is no law mandating such a thing, but all airlines do it anyway. They’re not going to waste their money on a bad pilot; not even American-based airlines are that stupid.
But, in section 10, there is the awful reason this bill needs to be killed, or at least amended. In section 10, it now requires that all first officers have an FAA ATP license.
To understand why this is so stupid, I have to first explain about the various licenses and certifications that pilots need to have. When one first begins to fly, they must get a Medical certifying that they are okay for flight. They can then get a Student Pilot License. This means they get to fly under the tight control of a flight instructor. After they learn a certain amount of things about flight, with nearly each hour of flight corresponding to an hour of one-on-one time with the flight instructor, and in most schools, a flight class, they then can get a write-off from their flight instructor to fly with an FAA agent. The person has to do this at least three times in the training. The final one, and an FAA knowledge test, gets them their Private Pilot Rating.
After the private pilot rating, there is similar study with increasingly more difficult aviation practice. A Private Pilot Rating allows you to fly in visual conditions- you have to be able to actually look outside the plane and visually confirm what your instruments are telling you. After the Private Pilot Certification, there is an Instrument Rating, allowing you to fly in clouds. Then there is a Complex Endorsement, enabling you to fly a plane with retractable gear, flaps, and an adjustable prop. After you have mastered these, you are now able to start learning how to fly well enough to actually be hired on as a pilot, and can get your Commercial Rating. Most pilots also gain their mulit-engine rating at the same time or before their commercial rating, enabling them to fly aircraft with (as the name would suggest) more than one engine.
In order to get into the airline as a first officer, you need a few hundred hours, minimum. The lowest I have heard of is 250 hours, during times when the airlines were desperate for new pilots. So, most pilots I know go on to get their Certified Flight Instructor rating and Certified Flight Instructor- Instrument rating to build hours cheaply, though they do not make very much money, and it isn’t a very stable income- you are literally bound by the weather. So, by the time you are actually a first officer in a regional airline, you already have been trained a great deal, under a lot of different conditions, and with no small amount of hours.
The next rating in the group is an ATP- Air Transport Pilot. This is required to be a captain of an airliner, and, among other things, requires you to have 1500 hours of flight time. What section 10 would require is that first officers have this rating, including the 1500 hour flight time.
First Officers make about 20,000 dollars a year, and the majority of them go into aviation with over 100,000 dollars of debt***. Learning how to fly is not cheap. The cheapest I’ve seen an hour of flight time, without an instructor, is 100 dollars per hour for a single-engine aircraft. Should this section of the bill pass, it will be near impossible to become a first officer in a regional. In three years time, the public would see the cost of flying triple.
Not only would this make it harder on everyone- first officers, airlines, passengers- it also shall not make anyone safer. The bulk of that 1500 hour requirement is cross-country flying. And one cross-country hour is much like the other- you could fly a million hours, and if you have never come across severe icing conditions, all those other flight hours are not going to help you when you do aside from maybe making you feel more confident. The hour requirements are because we need a rule of thumb, much like the age of majority set at 18. The hours are somewhat arbitrary. I’ve known excellent pilots with only 40 hours under their belt, and I’ve known terrible pilots with 200. The things that make you a good pilot are somewhat difficult to test for and legislate- how do you legislate whether or not someone can make a wise decision on whether to fly in the first place? How do you write a law mandating that someone not be too cocky when they fly? We write guidelines, and for the most part, they work pretty well. But, planes do crash- pilot error happens, conditions spring up quickly that the plane can’t fly in, something becomes stuck or loose and there is a mechanical problem. At some point, if you want to be able to fly, if you want people to be able to fly, you need to except a certain amount of risk.
This section of the bill is a catch-22 of huge portions. You are requiring people to amass a huge number of flight hours without any real way for them to do that. It is like asking someone to be a neurosurgeon before they can become a general practitioner.
And, before anyone asks, yes, I do have some bias in this, but not the ones people suspect. Hubby would probably be fine- you get a 3 year grace period to get the 1500 hours, and he can get that as he’s already flying for a regional. All this bill would do to us personally is make his job more secure and probably pay more. But I have tons of friends in aviation, that are scrapping by on flight instructor salaries (which might as well be a negative sign for the amount of hours they put in and the few they actually get paid for) and it people who are still trying to complete their aviation training and this would basically kill them. So, right out there, this is my bias- that in the name of “safety” they will basically have no ability to fly.
I urge everyone to contact their senator and tell them to block this bill. Unfortunately, I have been unable to see what the Senate Companion bill is titled, so you’re just going to have to reference it by the House bill, which was H.R. 3371.
This might not be as sexy as health care reform, or the economy, or gay rights, but this is important too to thousands of pilots and millions of people who want to fly home for holidays to come.
* When the news of the crash first hit, I was on pins and needles and worried for nearly an hour. The news first reported it as “a commuter jet”- my husband flies a CRJ200, a commuter jet, and he flies in that area. After I heard that, I could not get a hold of him on his cell phone (he shuts it off during flights). I could only take a quick breathe of relaxation when I found it was not a jet at all, but a DASH8- a turbo-prop. Then I immediately felt terrible, because other people still died and they had family and friends too.
** I do not wish to sound callous, at all, but the only way to make sure no one dies from a plane crash ever is for no one to fly. That is not to say that there shouldn’t be safety measures in aviation, of course, but rather to say that these rushed over bills tend to me more about looking like one is doing something rather than actually doing something. This new bill would not have saved the people who died in Buffalo. Icing conditions can spring up suddenly, and if you get a lot on the wings, you’re basically boned. The plane becomes a very heavy, very worthless glider.
***For instance, Hubby made 22,000 dollars last year, and has 156,000 dollars in student debt. Add my current couple thousand dollars a year and my 38,000 dollars of student debt and we are not doing well financially.
Colgan Air Flight 3407 that crashed in Buffalo went down because it went into a stall condition because the pilot let the airspeed drop because he lost situational awareness because he and the first officer broke the sterile cockpit rule. In addition, when the plane automatically dropped its nose to try to buy airspeed, he pulled back on the stick, over-riding the forward pressure, putting it into a hard stall. Ice was not a factor. Other factors were a tired flight crew and low hours in this aircraft.
The NTSB animation is here:
http://www.ntsb.gov/Events/2009/Buffalo-NY/AnimationDescription.htm
The CVR is on my website:
http://www.fear-of-flying.us/index.php?p=1_19_CVR-Transcripts
By the way, I have yet to see a recent (15 years) U.S. commercial (not general) icing crash not due to human error other than ATR-42/72′s . If you have an example, email me the NTSB report reference.
Thanks, Mark
IIRC the Dash-8 crash involved a qualified pilot encountering a stall condition and reacting by pulling back on the stick until impact. So I can see why someone might think standards should be tightened, but also agree with you that this is a hamfisted approach that makes life harder for professional pilots without clearly addressing the issue at hand. Hopefully they go back and come up with something more intelligent (but then, it IS congress…)
Stacy-
That’s not what I read. I read what happened was the first officer was lowering the flaps, got a stall indication, and reacted by bringing the flaps up (which is not the correct thing to do, but, does make sense as a reaction) and then captain responded by pulling back on the stick until impact. The captain’s reaction made sense- they had visible ice on the wings, and that generally means you have ice on the tail, so he was responding as if there was a tail stall (which was wrong- it was a normal stall). He, however, had more than 1500 hours, so again, this bill still wouldn’t have helped. And the ice on the wings still was considered the major factor.
Mark, thank you for providing more detail on the Colgan crash.
Do you have anything to say about the HR 3371?
So here’s a page on tail stalls: http://www.flightweb.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=931
And it says to do … the exact opposite of what you’d do for a normal stall, from pulling back on the stick to reducing power. So the information available to the pilot probably indicated the action he took.
Obviously you want to be good and damn sure you’re having a tail, not a regular, stall before you choose your control inputs.
I won’t second guess the pilot (though others will, so I stand by my first comment on the likely thinking behind the bill) but it seems that as long as you have some altitude to work with, you’d probably want to try a normal stall recovery first, and go to tail stall recovery only if the nose doesn’t come up.
Stacy-
Yep, pretty much. Tail stalls are the exact opposite of normal stalls, and the captain was making a good decision (but not the right one) when he did what he did.
And, no, the correct action is not to do a regular stall recovery first if you think it’s a tail stall. For one, if you do a regular stall recovery and you have a tail stall, you’re going to accelerate the stall. For two, you might also put in a spin. For three, you don’t generally have a ton of altitude to work with (particularly DASH’s- the fly lower than other commercial planes.)
All the Colgan comments most operate under the belief the pilot actually did attempt a tail stall recovery. That the Captain made control inputs similar to those of a tail stall recovery provides no evidence that these inputs were to correct a tail stall, only that they were not the proper inputs. We have no idea what he was thinking, and there is no evidence to support he assumed a tail stall was occurring.
Do any of the critics of the bill in this blog actually have an ATP? I didn’t think an ATP was anything more than a hoop to jump through prior to having one myself either; chalk it up to ignorance and inexperience, exactly what the ATP prevents.
HR 3371 is a good bill, especially the requirement for all airline transport pilots to have an ‘airline transport pilot’ license. This ATP pilot supports it 100%, as do the majority of ATP pilots.
Mystery-
Well, “making control inputs similar to a tail stall recovery” is, in fact, evidence that the pilot believed that he was in a tail stall. Why else would he have been doing them, exactly? Shits and giggles?
And, again, the captain had an ATP. So, requiring the FO to have the ATP would not have prevented this crash.
A line in the sand does have to be drawn somewhere- I am not opposed to the hour requirement in general. But, in this case, it would not be helpful in preventing any crashes, since the captain already NEEDS to have one, and this would cut off most people’s ability to get one. So I ask you, how exactly would one be able to afford the 1500 hours it would require to be a commercial airline pilot if this bill is passed? Do you want flying to be (even more so than it already is) something that only the rich can do?
Of course you support it, you already have your ATP (how did you get yours, if I may ask?) This is going to do nothing but secure ATP pilot’s ability to have a job. But when the three years comes up, how many pilots do you think will have their 1500 hours? How will the ones who don’t already have theirs supposed to get it? Flight instructing pays crap, and is uncertain hours (even more uncertain if the series of “Punish the GA bills” get passed). What are people supposed to do, be independently wealthy? And what will this do to the price of an airline ticket?
How will the ones who don’t already have theirs supposed to get it?
Military service might become the only cost-effective way of getting the necessary training and time. Can’t or don’t want to serve? Sucks to be you.
And there’s another potential problem as well: this 1500 hour requirement is going to greatly increase the commercial aviation job prospects for military pilots leaving the service by reducing their civilian competition to nearly nothing, greatly reducing the pool of FO candidates.
This in turn would drive up their starting salaries, making the option for leaving the service at the first opportunity a lot more attractive to military pilots.
Not only will this change kill civilian pilot training it will harm the military’s ability to retain their expensively taxpayer-trained pilots even as it makes recruitment easier.
So, the military gets to train the recruits and keep them for a few years while the airlines get all the veteran pilots. Public cost, private gain. What a shocker.
I don’t particularly want a lot of military pilots in my commercial airlines, actually. The power distance in the military vs. the power distance in normal American society ALONE would cause more crashes. Plus, pilots, in general (not that there aren’t exceptions) think that they’re god’s gift to the sky. Military pilots are WORSE.
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