Poor Pilots Flying For Regionals

Posted May 16th, 2009 by sky1

Interesting story on NY Times today about the not-so-glamorous lives of pilots flying for regionals.

"The National Transportation Safety Board’s inquiry into the Feb. 12 crash of Continental Connection Flight 3407 outside Buffalo has highlighted the operations of the nation’s regional airlines, a sector of the aviation industry that has grown to account for half the country’s airline flights and a quarter of its passengers.

The details of that world have surprised many Americans — the strikingly low pay for new pilots; the rigors of flying multiple flights, at lower altitudes and thus often in worse weather than pilots on longer routes, while scrambling to get enough sleep; the relative inexperience of pilots at the smaller airlines, whose training standards are the same, but whose skills may not be.

In hearings last week in Washington, witnesses and safety officials raised questions of whether the crew of the plane that crashed, killing all 49 people on board and one on the ground, had been adequately vetted and whether they might have been hampered by, among other factors, fatigue....

link to the story: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/17/nyregion/17pilot.html?pagewanted=1&_r=...