Buffalo, NY – The captain of Flight 3407, Marvin D. Renslow, completed his training on a Dash 8 just two months ago and had 110 hours flying the turboprop.
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His first officer, Rebecca Lynne Shaw, had built up about 770 hours flying the Dash 8 — roughly the hours a commercial pilot amasses in a year.
“As a general rule, the experience level in regional airlines is about a tenth of the experience level in major airlines,” said Douglas M. Moss, an airline pilot with more than 30,000 hours in the air and president of AeroPacific Consulting of Torrance, Calif.
“There’s a huge experience disparity. It should raise the eyebrows of a lot of people,” he said.
A National Transportation Safety Board member said Monday that investigators trying to determine the cause of Thursday night’s crash will assess, among other things, the training of Flight 3407’s crew, its schedule over the previous week and the prior 72 hours, in particular, to confirm they had the amount of rest that federal rules require.
Renslow and Shaw worked for Colgan Air, the subcontractor that runs Continental Airlines commuter flights. Pilots and aviation experts interviewed by The Buffalo News faulted neither Renslow nor Shaw for the crash that killed all 49 people aboard and a man on the ground in Clarence.
The experts said Renslow, 47, and Shaw, 24, were probably typical of the pilots who fly for regional airlines:
• They slog through long days for modest pay.
• They have fewer years in the business than their big-airline counterparts.
• More importantly, they have fewer experiences to draw on when facing the judgment calls.
“In reading hundreds of accident reports, the more experience the pilot has, the more able he is to handle the unique situations of any emergency,” Moss said.
“That is one advantage of flying a major airline: You have tremendously more experience,” he said. “The bag of resources a crew has is much larger. In the Hudson, Capt. Sullenberger wasn’t using procedures that are written somewhere. There’s no training for what he did. It’s all just experience.”
Capt. Chesley B. Sullenberger III was almost 58 and had about 20,000 hours of flight time when bird strikes took out both engines of an Airbus 320 and he crash-landed US Airways Flight 1549 perfectly into the Hudson River on Jan. 15, saving all 155 people onboard.
Renslow, by comparison, had built up 3,379 hours by Feb. 12, and Shaw 2,244.
Pilots employed by regional airlines are working their way up. Pilots for major airlines might earn $100,000 to $120,000, and first officers $60,000 to $70,000. Their counterparts with a regional airline are likely earn one-third to one-half as much. “So that first officer who was 24 years old was probably making $20,000 to $25,000 a year,” Moss said.
The NTSB considered Renslow and Shaw as experienced. Before Renslow trained on the Dash 8, he had thousands of hours on the smaller Saab twin-engine turboprop. “The training is good enough, strict enough and covers enough to make sure you are ready to do what you have to do when you are in that seat,” said the NTSB’s Steven R. Chealander.
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I flew a 19 seat turbo prop on a round trip flight. That’s the first time I got nervous on a plane. On one leg of the trip, the pilot looked like she was less than 5 ft tall and maybe weighed 100 pounds. The first officer looked like he was not old enough to shave. We only had three passengers, so I was asked to move to help balance the plane.
The plane had an open cockpit, which means depending on where you sit you can see out the windshield. We hit turbulence and I was watching the little pilot try to steady the plane.
scary stuff
I know someone who went to pilot school and he reported that the awful salaries described in the article are accurate. He would make more driving a bus.
I have has my Private Pilot license for years, and have hundreds of hours.
While it is true that the airline pilots do have more “experience” in “logged hours” what is a misleading stat.
First of all, most of my airline pilot friends, tell me they “Yearn to actually fly a plane.” These days they spend more time on autopilot, as the autopilots on the larger jets are so much more fuel efficient, that the airlines barely allow them to turn those autopilots off.
So, the big boy airline pilot may have thousands of more hours, and not actually many more “real flying time” hours in the past year.
The big boy airline pilots get a bit complacent after logging 20,000 hours.
One of My flight instructors actually stopped logging at 35,000 hours, he was so bored.
The Regional or Commuter pilot may have much more recent instructional time, which can be more valuable than many hours sitting and flying.
As far as “little” or “young” or “small” pilots, … one of the very best pilots I know, who can fly rings around me (I weigh in at 250+, and am 6′ 2″) while she is half my age, and looks like she is still in High School. She can fly an F-16 or a Re-fueling Tanker, or an Airbus, 747, DC-10, you name it. If it can fly, she can fly it, and be the best. If I had to trust anyone, I would trust that 5’1″ 98 pound blond.
Don’t judge a pilot by whom he/she flies for, or ONLY by how many hours he/she has. Time logged IS certainly valuable, but is by far not everything.
And, remember:
How in the world are we supposed to have 20,000+ hour pilots if we don’t let them fly those first 20,000 hours?!?!
The FAA sets the minimum for the Air Transport Certificate at 2,000 hours. But, many of those hours may be logged as instructor time. Unless a person flew for the Airforce, where in the world are they supposed to get those hours from?
And, by the way, with a few exceptions, like that girl I know, and a few others, Fighter Pilots do NOT make good airline pilots. Many have the totally wrong “attitude” and “fit” …. they tend to be too aggressive, and too “Top Gun”…
and lack a bit in the “Defensive Driving” attitude which you tend to want in that left seat.
The NTSB does not blame the pilots for the crash because they didn’t cause it, icing did. Still, you know that other pilots would have handled it diferrently. I am not saying other pilots would have prevented the crash, but as we know the pilot tried to open and close the flap to shake of the ice. There has to be more then that to get ice off the wings. I don’t want to sound rude, but women should not be pilots. We all know that most women handle crisises differently then men, many- not all women think emotionally during the time of a crisis.
If you remember there was a plane crash a month after 9/11, in that case the pilot over-reacted to turbulance and pushed the rudder too far causing it to snap off. It was definitely human error- in that case the pilot (a male) over-reacted and his passengers never survived. The pilot who had barely and experience and his first officer who was 24 and a woman may have over-reacted or just weren’t thinking while the plane was in a tail spin. G-d rest their souls.
Oppps Jake, you may have spoken too soon. It may be proven that the pilot’s experience flying the small Saab actually caused his poor choice as the pusher-stick activated. He reacted as if it was a tail-stall, when in fact it was a wing stall effect happening. Sad how one pull doomed the flight at only 2300 feet.