Hfcomms
EN66iq
I read a post about this over on TOL and this poster was a first officer on a regional airline about 10 years ago. He made a total of six thousand dollars for his flying for the year with the airline!! The regionals are seen as stepping stones for the big leagues and these small airlines pay people peanuts. What the pilots get for it is a lot of stick time to build up their logbooks in order to rack up turbine hours which might get them a real airline job at some point in the future.
It's pretty incredible as the cockpit voice recorder showed that both of them were aware of severe icing conditions and the pilot had said that he had not seen worse icing since he started flying. With this high pressure situation how in the world could they find time to flirt and banter back and forth with idle conversation?
They knew in advance that they were flying into a very dicey situation and they both needed to be on top of their game on the approach. Anyone who has flown in known icing conditions knows that the ice not only adds weight but changes the shape of the airfoil. You have to be very careful and need to carry extra speed on the approach to make up for the loss of lift. In addition changing the position of the gear and flaps changes the airflow and can result in unexpected pitch conditions. Tired or not and inexperienced or not I can't for the life of me contemplate such a laid back demeanor on that approach. The result....lots of dead people.
It's pretty incredible as the cockpit voice recorder showed that both of them were aware of severe icing conditions and the pilot had said that he had not seen worse icing since he started flying. With this high pressure situation how in the world could they find time to flirt and banter back and forth with idle conversation?
They knew in advance that they were flying into a very dicey situation and they both needed to be on top of their game on the approach. Anyone who has flown in known icing conditions knows that the ice not only adds weight but changes the shape of the airfoil. You have to be very careful and need to carry extra speed on the approach to make up for the loss of lift. In addition changing the position of the gear and flaps changes the airflow and can result in unexpected pitch conditions. Tired or not and inexperienced or not I can't for the life of me contemplate such a laid back demeanor on that approach. The result....lots of dead people.
