
The Colgan Air disaster was a milestone in aviation safety - jaredwiener
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-02-12/the-colgan-air-crash-helped-keep-90-million-flights-safe
======
danaliv
One of the biggest changes that came out of the Colgan crash is the so-called
"1500 hour rule." Before Colgan, only the captain needed to have an airline
transport pilot (ATP) certificate, the highest level of pilot certification.
First officers (copilots) could fly with a commercial pilot certificate, a
lower grade of license. Now, both pilots are required to hold ATP
certificates.

ATP applicants need to have 1500 hours of flight experience—hence "1500 hour
rule"—though there are exceptions if you've attended specific approved
aeronautical schools or have military experience. Commercial applicants need
only 250 hours. (Here too there are exceptions for certain training programs.)
The standards on the flight tests are tighter for ATPs and the written exams
are worlds apart.

As an instructor I can tell you the difference between a 250-hour pilot and a
1500-hour pilot can be enormous. Not always—some pilots have 1500 hours, and
others have the same hour, 1500 times in a row—but there can be a huge
difference.

This rule has been controversial though, not least of all because both pilots
in the Colgan crash already had more than 1500 hours. And the FAA made so many
changes after Colgan that it's been hard to tell which of those changes
actually made the difference, and which, if any, were simply no-ops. Critics
of the rule have especially focused on how many flight tests the Colgan
captain failed, and how the response by the pilots to an aerodynamic stall was
completely backwards. Aerodynamic stalls are something you learn in your first
ten hours of training as a private pilot and drill constantly throughout your
career, so to get that wrong at the air carrier level speaks to an incredible
failure in training and evaluation.

~~~
Someone1234
It also isn't clear (aside from military) how people are meant to fund/attain
ATP status.

There's limited jobs with which a commercial licensed pilot can gain hours
(e.g. crop dusting, sky jumpers, instructors, etc) but the number of people
trying to attain ATP/jobs requiring ATPs well outstrip the number of jobs to
support those people getting to 1500 hours.

As you said, previously some airlines would take the pressure off by hiring
commercial pilots and getting them hours as copilots. With the new rules they
need 1500 before day one, so that has to come from somewhere and it isn't
clear where.

This is one reason airlines are struggling to find pilots.

~~~
markdown
> This is one reason airlines are struggling to find pilots.

There isn't really a pilot shortage. Merely a shortage of pilots willing to
work for slave wages. There are US pilots flying all over the world because
they don't get paid what they're worth in the US.

~~~
noahl
Quick reminder: "slave wages" are exactly $0, and also you can't leave the job
due to threat of violence. (And also there's a lot of violence anyway, and
also bad housing and bad food and complete lack of personal time or space or
privacy or any freedom of choice, etc.)

It sounds like regional airline pilots may have surprisingly low wages given
how highly-skilled their jobs are. "Low wages" is a good term for this.

~~~
Someone
It isn’t slavery, indeed, but waged can get lower than low. Pilots can be
pressurized in accepting very low wages for the right to fly an airplane.

Reason? Pilots have to make flight hours in the plane they’re licensed for to
keep their license.

So, you are, say, $100,000 in debt to get a license to fly a 737, and you need
a few hours in it this month to keep that license. Renting said plane for a
few hours is very expensive. That makes an $0 an hour ‘job’ flying for a few
hours look mightily attractive.

------
ChuckMcM
This is an excellent example of how regulation should work as opposed to how
it works in regulatory capture situations.

In a prisoners dilemma like set up, if any airline unilaterally changed their
rules for pilots and crews, they would "lose out" when they didn't have crews
to fly, while other airlines would "win more" by overworking their flight
crews. The only "win" was for all airlines to not implement these changes.

But when the changes were forced on everyone, it removed the advantage of not
following the guidelines (well it added a criminal or civil prosecution risk)
and so all airlines have at least minimally rested crews.

That message seems to get lost sometimes.

~~~
smacktoward
I would say this is an excellent example of how regulation _shouldn 't_ work.

Even before the Colgan Air crash, it was widely understood that regional
airlines' overworking and undertraining of their pilots was risky. But the
regulators either weren't able to do anything about it in the face of industry
opposition, or didn't care enough to do so. It took a plane actually crashing,
50 people dying and Congress, which was lobbied hard by the families of the
victims, passing new legislation ordering them to do something about the
problem to get them to take action.

It's great that we have regulations protecting passengers from these problems
now. But it would have been _much better_ if it hadn't taken the deaths of
those 50 people to create an environment where it was possible for such
regulations to be enacted. Good regulators protect people _before_ there's
blood on the floor, not after.

~~~
civilitty
_> Good regulators protect people before there's blood on the floor, not
after._

So to be good regulators, they have to be essentially omniscient?

~~~
smt88
No. Post-mortems of these types of disasters usually reveal that warning signs
were visible if anyone cared to look or act.

One example happening now: extreme, pervasive sleep deprivation in the US
Navy. We've already had disasters that could've been prevented if someone
talked to even a single sailor and realized how dangerous that is.

Another example is self-driving cars. We just had a Tesla crash, and yet Tesla
will not be regulated properly and will likely kill someone soon. Arguably,
they already have.

------
edoo
On youtube now you can find flight simulator reenactments of most every crash
and air incident. They are quite fascinating and much much better than TV
style dramatizations.

Here is this incident: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LzY-
hzxlqig](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LzY-hzxlqig)

~~~
cf498
The air traffic control recordings alone are really great. When the guy stole
a plane from Seattle airport to take it for a joyride, i got stuck and clicked
myself through what felt like half the ATC recordings on youtube. Can only
recommend it, the level of international communication is rather astonishing.

[https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCuedf_fJVrOppky5gl3U6QQ](https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCuedf_fJVrOppky5gl3U6QQ)

------
gingerbread-man
The most significant regulatory change following the Colgan crash was the
added requirement that all airline (Part 21) first officers possess an Airline
Transport Pilot (ATP) certificate prior to hiring. Previously, only captains
(as pilots-in-command) were required to hold that certificate, which requires
a minimum 1500 hours of flight experience. [1]

In practical terms, this wasn't a big change (insurance underwriters already
required it), but 1500 hours is a significant hurdle at at time when the US is
facing a shortage of pilots.

[1] [https://www.flyingmag.com/news/faa-finalizes-atp-rule-
first-...](https://www.flyingmag.com/news/faa-finalizes-atp-rule-first-
officers)

~~~
sokoloff
It's not required prior to _hiring_ ; it's prior to _flying your first revenue
flight_. The distinction is somewhat important as it's not as easy to get an
ATP (any more) with the introduction of the ATP-CTP requirement.

Though I have no need for an ATP, I considered getting one under the old
(quite easy) rules.

------
peterwwillis
Compare this to cars. Every year in the US there are about 6 million car
crashes, 3 million injured people, and about 33,000 dead people (so, imagine a
city like Dover, Delaware being wiped off the face of the earth every year).

The most typical causes are alcohol, speeding, and reckless driving. In
addition, seat belts cut the risk of death by 45%. So, if we wanted to keep
people safe the way we do for airlines, we would just attack these four
problems.

There are many solutions, but the simplest ones would involve 1) a mandatory
breathalyzer, 2) speed limiters, 3) sensors that shut down the car when
reckless driving is detected, and 4) shutting down the car if seatbelts are
not used. These all exist today, and would save tens of thousands of lives a
year, and prevent millions of casualties, lawsuits, traffic jams, etc.

Why don't we do these things? My theory is the illusion of safety. In a car,
you're wrapped inside 2 tons of steel and plastic, and you feel safe. Even if
you know _other_ people are dying inside, you feel like it won't happen to
you. So we don't worry, so we don't care about changing things to save lives,
because it'd be an inconvenience. But in an airplane, you're not in control;
some pilot is. And you're hurtling along at at 500 miles per hour, 40,000 feet
above the sky. That's scary. We better make sure those planes are safe.

~~~
mherchel
It's harder to implement on cars.

1) People would (and do) cheat at mandatory breathalyzers.

2) It's not speeding that injures people, it's the speed differences that
cause issues. Limiting a car to 70mph won't help when it's icy, and they
should be driving 40mph.

3) How exactly would a car detect reckless driving? How would it know that it
wasn't warranted (ie swerving to avoid a kid)?

~~~
yoda222
> It's not speeding that injures people, it's the speed differences that cause
> issues.

When two car are at a speed of 70mph, the maximum speed difference between
them is 140mph, when they are at 50mph, it's only 100mph. So the speed of a
car has a direct impact on the speed difference between cars.

------
misiti3780
I flew into buffalo that night about an hour before the crash. I remember
thinking when we were landing that these conditions were some of the worst,
and I fly a lot into Buffalo.

------
huangc10
My brother is a commercial airline pilot who flies world wide and pilot
fatigue is real and very common.

Airlines have been making bank for the last few years and all they need to do
to prevent pilot fatigue is reduce hours for pilots and increase the number of
pilots/flight, especially for international flights.

These simple measures (albeit costly), will overall help reduce commercial
flight fatalities across the globe.

~~~
dopamean
My father was an airline pilot for years (American, US Airways, and then
Etihad) flying domestically and then internationally. I'd guess that if the
airlines wanted to reduce pilot hours the pilot unions would have a lot to say
about that.

~~~
SmellyGeekBoy
Are they paid by the hour? I'd assume that pilots would earn an annual salary.

~~~
huangc10
Most pilots do earn an annual salary. I'm not sure what the previous comment
meant. Pilots simply have to work minimum number of hours per month, but the
issue is that most pilots are now working up to the maximum number of hours
therefore there are actually pilot union striking because of overwork!

------
delinka
Based entirely on the headline: doesn’t every crash prevent most future
crashes that would have had the same cause?

~~~
misiti3780
Yep, I always loved this line from Antifragile:

> “But recall that this chapter is about layering, units, hierarchies, fractal
> structure, and the difference between the interest of a unit and those of
> its subunits. So it is often the mistakes of others that benefit the rest of
> us—and, sadly, not them. We saw that stressors are information, in the right
> context. For the antifragile, harm from errors should be less than the
> benefits. We are talking about some, not all, errors, of course; those that
> do not destroy a system help prevent larger calamities. The engineer and
> historian of engineering Henry Petroski presents a very elegant point. Had
> the Titanic not had that famous accident, as fatal as it was, we would have
> kept building larger and larger ocean liners and the next disaster would
> have been even more tragic. So the people who perished were sacrificed for
> the greater good; they unarguably saved more lives than were lost. The story
> of the Titanic illustrates the difference between gains for the system and
> harm to some of its individual parts. The same can be said of the debacle of
> Fukushima: one can safely say that it made us aware of the problem with
> nuclear reactors (and small probabilities) and prevented larger
> catastrophes. (Note that the errors of naive stress testing and reliance on
> risk models were quite obvious at the time; as with the economic crisis,
> nobody wanted to listen.)”

~~~
CamperBob2
_The engineer and historian of engineering Henry Petroski presents a very
elegant point. Had the Titanic not had that famous accident, as fatal as it
was, we would have kept building larger and larger ocean liners and the next
disaster would have been even more tragic. So the people who perished were
sacrificed for the greater good; they unarguably saved more lives than were
lost. The story of the Titanic illustrates the difference between gains for
the system and harm to some of its individual parts. The same can be said of
the debacle of Fukushima: one can safely say that it made us aware of the
problem with nuclear reactors (and small probabilities) and prevented larger
catastrophes._

Another interesting argument along the same lines is that if we hadn't bombed
Hiroshima and Nagasaki, there would have been no reason for Truman to stop
MacArthur from using bombs a hundred times worse in the Korean conflict.

It's a sobering thought regardless of one's opinion on the atomic bombings in
Japan. The lesson was going to be learned one way or the other, and arguably
humanity got off easy.

~~~
misiti3780
I have never heard that one -- but it makes sense.

------
nkanetka
Meanwhile in Canada regulations are still appalling and some of the worst in
the world: [https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/garneau-pilot-safety-
airlin...](https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/garneau-pilot-safety-airline-
regulations-1.4942385)

------
austincheney
How catastrophic must a software disaster be to receive the benefits of such
safety regulation?

~~~
bdamm
There are software glitches responsible for the deaths of on the order of 100
people, which has resulted in industry-localized development and deployment
standards. When we see tragedies where 1000 people die because of a software
glitch, or more likely, a systems or security failure, then I think we'll see
legislators start coming for the software industry in general. There are
already critical systems development and systems requirements; likely
legislators will expand and formalize those kinds of programs.

All we need to do is have a public tragedy that can be pinned on "software".

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bernardom
This is real engineering. And this is what I'm most excited about with
autonomous cars- black boxes allow the NTSB to get involved and work accidents
out of the process.

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Simulacra
I think something we haven’t learned from the Colgan disaster is how regional
airlines are configuring these smaller jet and turboprop planes to fit more
passengers, in ways they were not designed. That is leading the way towards
profit over safety.

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cm2187
I wish one could write the same title about software...

