So let me take the bait: Colgan Air crashed because the captain ( with 3379 hours) and the first officer (with 2244 hours) completely mishandled the flight. Reason in the NTSB report
- Fatigue: Long commute, short sleep, long days work
- Captain (repeatedly!!) difficulty passing check rides
- a failure to follow rules barring nonwork conversations in the cockpit
- inadequate training for emergencies specially stalls
- Oh and the FO felt sick on the day of the flight but felt since she had travelled so far already
So there was a great report on how to make the industry safe....
Unfortunately the families and congress are not good at reading and think more is better so instead of pushing improvements in training through they want more hours
Let me ask you the following: when you want a heart surgeon operating on you do you want
A) a doctor who has trained to be specifically a heart surgeon at a great medical university who has done 25 operations
B) a doctor who has just made it through his training at a local medical school that is ok but just that and has done 100s of operations making stitches on people who fell down etc
That is the problem with 1500 hours: IT IS ALL ABOUT THE QUALITY OF TRAINING not the number of hours!! I have flown with 20.000 hour guys who where crap
