Pilot, Air, or Pilot Error?
Each year corporations spend billions of dollars on training their employees in any number of areas including, communication skills, teamwork, leadership, customer relationship management, computer literacy, company policies, even healthy lifestyle choices. For obvious reasons, workers in the airline industry, especially pilots, receive some of the most intensive, extensive, and expensive training around. That fact having been acknowledged, I do not believe, as the Mail & Guardian apparently does, that a lack of training, or even the wrong training, was in any way the cause of this egregious instance of pilot error:
Two airline pilots joked and laughed as they flew an empty commercial jet to its limits, switched seats in mid-air and ignored automated warnings before crashing into a residential area, a cockpit voice recorder has revealed.
Captain Jesse Rhodes and First Officer Peter Cesarz were both killed after they decided to "have a little fun" and take the 50-seat Pinnacle Airlines jet they were flying to 41 000ft -- the limit of its capability. No one was hurt on the ground in Jackson City, Missouri, where the plane came down after suffering catastrophic engine failure.
"Ooh look at that," Cesarz said, apparently referring to cockpit readings. "Pretty cool."
"Man, we can do it. Forty-one it," the captain replied. "Forty thousand, baby."
Two minutes later Cesarz said: "Made it, man."
But seconds later, as an automatic system began warning of a stall, one of the pilots is heard to say: "Dude, it's losing it." A voice then said: "We don't have any engines. You got to be kidding me."
The plane crashed 4km from the runway, missing houses.The transcripts were released as part of a federal investigation into whether pilots of small regional airlines are getting adequate training and supervision.
The Mail & Guardian's attribution is misplaced. To be sure, there was an organizational process that stalled out here, but it wasn't training, baby: it was screening. There are no commercial pilots, including the ones in question, that aren't told and that don't know that that kind of behavior is highly irresponsible, man. This is doubly so in the thin air of 41,000 feet. The problem, as I see it, is that the airline clearly hired the wrong dudes. My advice to management is that they increase the attention they pay to background checks and personality assessments of their would-be pilots and thereby ensure that lug nuts wind up on the landing gear and not in the cockpit. Not doing so could make the whole airline experience catastrophic failure.
Linked by: Bloggin' Outloud and The Political Teen and Third World County and Land of Ozz.
Comments
Good story. I agree with the error away from training... but I find it difficult to believe that there could be two pilots would not have had better judgement than this.. Makes me think that they is more here...(problems with instrument readings.)
Posted by: MB | November 21, 2005 11:56 AM