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Old 11th Apr 2009, 05:43
  #2203 (permalink)  
PJ2
 
Join Date: Mar 2003
Location: BC
Age: 76
Posts: 2,485
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MU3001A;
The professional approach ought to be based on determining what happened and why, so that we can hopefully learn the right lessons and debate solutions that may help to prevent something similar happening in the future.
The right lesson here was learned in 1903 and thousands of times later: Pay attention or die.

There is no substitute for situational awareness and no excuse whatsoever for stalling your aircraft. A radio altimeter failure is the blandest of failures - a non-event.

For real learning to occur here this must first be accepted. The lesson here is in why three experienced crew stalled their airplane.

Frankly, Rainboe is almost certainly correct: the CVR isn't going to tell us anything we can't reasonably surmise already: this crew was not flying the airplane, they were chatting, discussing whatever and got the wake-up call with the stick-shaker.

Whether you or anyone can accept this is immaterial - a perfectly serviceable airliner was stalled by its crew. This is not a case which has obscure, organizational or technical underpinnings.

We have one, very likely two stall accidents on our hands. Why? The Colgan report included some strong indications that a non-sterile cockpit was being examined as a factor in the Buffalo accident.

This discussion is most certainly not a discourse about blame. You need to come to terms with the difference between a blame culture and some very blunt facts about aviation - that very bad things happen if you don't pay attention to what you're doing all the time. That is what happened. It is where the problem began and ended. That isn't assigning blame, that is finding cause, and in this case, it is not complicated. If you think there are solutions to this, as a safety specialist with 40 years of flying (35 in heavy equipment), let me ask you what they are; more CRM? More enforcement of SOPs? More technology? More of . . . ?

At what point do we truly hand over our aircraft and our profession to the engineers and sit back, fat, dumb and happy, to use the old expression?

Last edited by PJ2; 11th Apr 2009 at 06:31.
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