New Revelations On Buffalo, N.Y., Plane Crash

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MICHELE NORRIS, host:

This is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED from NPR News. I'm Michele Norris.

ROBERT SIEGEL, host:

And I'm Robert Siegel. There are new and alarming details about the pilot who was flying the Continental commuter plane that crashed outside Buffalo in February. All 49 people on board and one person on the ground were killed. In a National Transportation Safety Board hearing scheduled for tomorrow, we're going to hear testimony that the pilot failed flight tests and may not have been adequately trained. Those details were first reported in the Wall Street Journal, and I spoke earlier today with the Journal's Andy Pasztor.

Mr. ANDY PASZTOR (Reporter, The Wall Street Journal): I think the records that come out at the National Transportation Safety Board hearing will show that Captain Marvin Renslow had a checkered history of training. They're called proficiency check rides, or proficiency checks. He actually got an unsatisfactory rating on three of them administered by the FAA when he was still flying general aviation aircraft. But more importantly, the company's confirmed that he actually failed two tests as one of their employees. He was retrained, and eventually ended up passing those tests. And I think the board and many safety experts are looking at this pattern and raising questions about the controls inside the airline that would allow that kind of training to…

SIEGEL: Now, the company in question here is Colgan Air of, I gather, of Manassas, Virginia, which contracted to operate commuter flights for Continental and, I gather, for other airlines as well.

Mr. PASZTOR: That's correct. And Colgan is a wholly owned subsidiary of Pinnacle Airlines Corp., which is a larger commuter airline. And actually, the investigation, I believe, will delve into other safety lapses and problems at Pinnacle and Colgan over the years. They have had some significant problems, both incidents, and unfortunately, some fatal crashes.

SIEGEL: Now the National Transportation Safety Board has benefit of the cockpit flight recorders, so we have some sense of what actually happened on this plane. And I gather what happened is not in conflict with the notion of a pilot who was not well-prepared for the emergency that he faced.

Mr. PASZTOR: The cockpit voice recorders and the flight data recorders will show, first of all, that there was a lot of extraneous discussion during this flight, including below 10,000 feet on approach to an airport, which is strictly prohibited by FAA rules and by all airline regulations and…

SIEGEL: No banter under 10,000 feet.

Mr. PASZTOR: Not unless you're talking about flying issues. And it appears, from the information that's come out so far and from the experts that have been able to get into some of the data, the crew was distracted. There were not watching, perhaps, as carefully as they should have been, and they allowed the aircraft to get too slow. And after that point, when it - when the aircraft became too slow and they got a warning of a stall, that's when the actions taken by the captain probably doomed the plane, because he did exactly the wrong thing.

SIEGEL: Things that he would've learned not to do had he successfully taken on board the lessons of flight training?

Mr. PASZTOR: Well, in most aviation crashes, it's a complicated set of circumstances. It's never just one or two, and I think in this case, too, it appears the copilot and the pilot were worried about icing issues. They were worried about icing on the tail of their aircraft because that's what some of their training had shown them, and that's perhaps some of the planes that they flew before. Ironically, the aircraft they were flying, the Q400, is not susceptible to that kind of icing. But they overreacted when they got an indication of a stall, and the theory by investigators is that they reacted believing that they were having problems with ice on the tail when, in fact, the problem was that the plane was too slow and it was stalling because it was just simply flying too slowly.

SIEGEL: We all have the experience when flying on a commuter plane of getting a ticket that says Continental, even a plane that may say Continental on it, but we're told that it's operated, in this case, by Colgan Airlines, which is owned by Pinnacle Airlines. Is Continental equally responsible with Colgan because they said it was their flight?

Mr. PASZTOR: That's a very interesting question, of course, and it's going to be one that this crash highlights. Continental has some responsibility to monitor the safety programs at its commuter affiliates, but in fact, Colgan is a fully licensed, authorized airline that's supposed to be inspected and supervised by the FAA. And, of course, there are inspectors who work at Colgan. So I think that the bigger question here is for 14 years, the FAA and the industry have been telling passengers that commuter airlines and mainline carriers basically have the same level of safety. I think this accident will highlight that that's not really the case in this instance, and perhaps in many other instances.

SIEGEL: Andy Pasztor, thank you very much for talking with us.

Mr. PASZTOR: My pleasure. Thank you.

SIEGEL: That's Andy Pasztor of the Wall Street Journal.

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