Something interesting to me is that people have looked into all the corners about this Colgan crash without anyone mentioning the last Colgan crash.
In that one a Beech 1900 had its elevator trim mis-rigged so that "nose up" in the cockpit was "nose down" at the elevators. The engineers missed this and so did the flight crew.
When the crew departed on an empty positioning flight the PF kept trimming "nose up" until the aircraft went in, trimmed so heavily nose down that he couldn't hold it any longer.
You could see that "accident chain" at work in that one, with the last, fatal link being the PF not being sharp enough to think, "Maybe I better stop trimming before this thing gets away from me or even think to check what going the 'wrong' way does," or perhaps the PNF not noticing what was going on. As it was, they went in right after take-off with no height or time to sort the problem out but with an empty aircraft this one didn't make the headlines.
Colgan is typical of these "bottom feeder" operations, offering the sort of job you just hope to survive with until you can find a decent one. Crew forced to sleep in the Crew Room, unable to afford a motel room? Ah, just ban them from doing that! This is the sort of man-management we used to joke about with, "All leaves are cancelled until morale improves!"
It probably isn't that Chuck Colgan wants to be Simon Legree, just that the sort of contracts he goes after must have really thin profit margins. There's just not enough in the pot for an extra portion of gruel and if you don't like that, there is a stack of CVs "this high," low-time guys ready and eager to take your place!
You can see a vast, shaky edifice built up here, the Colgans and the Gulfstreams and what-not all enticed to play "airline," allowed to paint airline livery such as Delta, American and United on their little regional "airliners," their low-experience, low-skill, low-pay crews all dressed up nice in uniforms some of them have to pay for partly out of their own wages... could you call this "bait and switch"? Pay good money for a mainline ticket but find yourself on a Q400 flown by such a pair as this crash crew: that is what I mean.
So far the FAA seems to be okay with this as long as the correct boxes are being ticked on the training forms and never mind the reality of the product.