Word: cockpit
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...commuter plane missed Shenandoah Valley Airport in Virginia by six miles as it tried to land through clouds and fog. The crash killed the two crew members and all twelve passengers. The NTSB investigation blamed navigational errors by the crew. But it cited a list of contributing factors: the cockpit was so noisy that the captain and first officer had either to shout or to use hand signals to communicate; both were relatively inexperienced; and Henson's training in its aircraft, which have differing instrument layouts, was inadequate. The crew members, who had flown together only twice before, were undergoing...
...down first is the commuter airline," says Pete Pedigrew, a captain with Pacific Southwest. Tony Levier, an industry-safety expert, is in agreement. "A lot of these airlines are operating on shoestrings. They may meet the FAA regulations on paper but not in reality." On some commuter flights, both cockpit seats may be occupied by inexperienced officers. That, too, observes John Lauber of NTSB, "can be a lethal combination...
...large airliners, passengers have another reason to be uneasy. After studying 30 cockpit flight-crew members, Dr. Martin Moore-Ede, a professor at the Harvard Medical School, discovered that on long high-altitude flights, the cockpit crew is sometimes asleep. The pilots, copilots and navigators he interviewed admitted that they have either nodded off on the job or had to struggle not to do so an average of 16 times a month. This usually happens sometime between 4 and 5 in the morning. In other research, Moore-Ede discovered an incident in which a transcontinental flight missed its Los Angeles...
Pinched airlines tend to defer repairs on items that do not require immediate grounding of a plane. One pilot admitted that he flew his jet even though in his cockpit 14 red tags were hanging from parts on which needed maintenance work had been deferred. While this may be legal, John Galipault of the Aviation Safety Institute insists that one airline assigns mechanics to fly in what repairmen call "hangar queens," airplanes that develop frequent problems. When a minor ailment arises, the flying mechanic "signs off" on the paperwork needed to permit the plane to keep operating, even though...
...Airlines Electra that killed 70 people, many of them fans returning to Minneapolis from the 1985 Super Bowl game in San Francisco, turned out to be a horror story of multiple mistakes. NTSB investigators found that on the ground at Reno, the headsets between the ground supervisor and the cockpit did not work, so hand signals were used. After the pilot started two engines, a ground handler discovered that she could not disconnect an air hose used in the starts. The supervisor began frantically signaling the pilots to stop so the hose could be freed. Distracted, the ground crew failed...