We were all troubled this February when Flight 3407, run by Colgan Air, crashed killing all on board. As near as we can tell it happened due to tail plane icing...a less-familiar problem that requires counter-intuitive recovery procedures. An important result of the accident investigation is national focus on life for regional airline pilots. People are starting to look at the training, schedules and procedures used by the regionals. We stand to learn a lot from these investigations and lawmakers are brewing some legislation to apply these lessons. Unfortunately though, Colgan Air seems to be ignoring safety issues and blaming the pilots they failed to take care of.

A recent CNN.com article relates that Colgan Air sent the NTSB a long report about the accident placing a lot of blamem on the pilots of Flight 3407. They try to villainize the captain because he's failed a couple of checkrides in his lifetime. Who hasn't though...this fact is far from damning. Some say that there are two type of pilots: those who have and those who will.... Colgan also blames both pilots for commuting to work and they act like the $24,000 per year the copilot was earning is more than fair. I don't know about you, but a lot of this is pretty absurd to me. I'm pretty disappointed at the outrageous excuses that Colgan is trying to put forth when it seems apparent to me that the environment they provide for their pilots is not one that promotes safety of passengers or crew.

The NTSB looked at the incident and decided that many of the circumstances that Colgan is trying to blame on their pilots are actually system-wide problems. They're releasing reports and making recommendations and people are listening. The Airline Pilots Association (ALPA) has made statements generally supporting safety efforts.

In Washington, lawmakers are working on a bill (currently HR 3371) that aims to combat problems like pilot experience, fatigue, training and other issues. I think the regulation overall is a good thing. It'll target training and address fatigue issues for pilots.

One controversial part though is that it proposes the minimum qualification for an airline first officer to be an Airline Transport Pilot rating. On one hand, this is a good idea...it'd put more experienced people in airline cockpits and ideally that would be more safe. The problem with this is that there would be no way to produce these ATPs. 1500 hours is a very hefty demand and most regional pilots bury themselves in debt just getting a few hundred ours and their commercial ratings. They rely on an airline paying them as a first officer to get the rest of their hours. If young pilots lose that option they'll have to scrape for jobs teaching or flying charters, ag or freight. Unfortunately, I don't think there are too many unfilled jobs in those areas and if we were to suddenly flood that job market with hundreds more aspiring airline pilots, we wouldn't be able to support everyone. Martin Rottler from Datotastudent.com has a pretty good discussion of this side of the concern.

What do you think? How do we balance this? Do we need 1500 hours of experience for an airline first officer? If we suddenly require that many hours what will happen to our current airline industry...would they even be able to keep flying? If we put this requirement into effect, how are we going to season young pilots? Leave a comment and let us know.