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When was the last commercial airline crash in the US?

How much effort is taken after an airline crash to provide additional training to current commercial airline pilots?

  • It would be great to hear some specific examples of procedural/training changes that followed from recents disasters, and how much attention is paid to such disasters on a personal level.

  • Answer:

    Personally, I always look at the accidents to examine my own ways of doing things and how I can avoid falling into a similar trap.  This is done with the incidents that don't make the news more so than with the major accidents, where the NTSB does a fairly in-depth investigation and analysis.  Most of the incidents outside of my own airline I hear from other industry sources and the ones within are talked about by our training department.  These are all nothing exciting for news agencies (no one dead) but they are of interest to those who have a stake in the game. As far as industry-wide changes, the only one that really sticks out from a training point-of-view was the Colgan crash in Buffalo.  We dramatically changed how we did stalls in the sim.  It changed from being a demonstration of airmanship as you did "approaches-to-stall" where you slow to a near stall then accelerate out of it, to being a stall-recovery maneuver.  The approach-to-stall focused a lot on maintaining altitude and, while valuable as a demonstration of airmanship, it did not reinforce stall recovery (pitch down and increase power, trade altitude for airspeed as needed).  Ironically, the new way is very similar to the way you'll do stalls in training for a Private Pilot license. There's a lot we don't train specifically for in the sims, simply because it would be ridiculous to train for every conceivable event.  I always laugh when I hear news anchors say, "well they train for this sort of thing all the time", and I know that no one trains for THAT thing.  Between my friends and I that's called "doing some of that pilot sh*t".  We're paid to handle situations that might not be as sterile as the type of stuff you can program in the sim.  I'll bet dollars to doughnuts that Sully never did any simulator events with a massive bird strike at 3,000 ft followed by a dual-engine failure.

Eric Silski at Quora Visit the source

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Usually there will be a lot of emphasis on past accidents in the simulator. If a crash is caused by some kind of technical fault, the training captains will try to recreate the scenario and conditions so you can see, as a pilot, how the crew that had the problem would have reacted by doing it yourself. Then you talk about what other options you would have in such a situation i.e. 'what could have been done different?'. It's always easy to be Captain Hindsight, but in some cases it is a good thing for the crew to experience the exact same situation and try to deal with it. If the crash is caused by human factors, i.e. crew error or air traffic confusion, the training captain will try to push you towards the same conditions that crew had with regards to task saturation, CRM (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crew_resource_management) or some other human factor issue. In general, a lot of the simulator training is based on previous experiences and accidents. So to answer your question: A lot is done to train aircrew so that an accident won't happen again. I hope this answers you question Christoffer

Christoffer Buusmann

Many major commercial crashes have led to new safety requirements as well as training changes/enhancements.   For example, after the worst ever accident (in Tenerife, Canary Islands) in aviation history, ICAO as well as individual nations aviation regulators put a larger emphasis on English as a second language.  Airlines changed their training to only use the word "takeoff" when actually being cleared to take off, and better training came out about radio ettiquette and so forth.   Or after the American Airlines Flight 587 crash in Queens, NY in November of 2001, airlines operating the specific aircraft in question (Airbus 300) including American Airlines added more training to pilots to not overuse their rudder in response to wake turbulence encounters.  That crash stemmed from a pilot using the rudder too much for such a situation, and the plane's vertical stabilizer broke off, causing a loss of control.   Another example would be the Air France and Colgan Air crashes in 2009.  Colgan has led, indirectly, to new FAA rules for hiring standards for commercial operators that increase the minimum time to 1500 hours.  Air France is leading to looks at the design setup of the A330 jet.  Both crashes have spurred discussion about pilots's skills at properly recognizing and recovering control over aircraft in unusual aerodynamic situations.   On a personal level, obviously any crash is likely to spur aviation professionals to consider (or reconsider) how they behave and perform in certain situations.  They are reminders that "it could be me" and we tend to review how we do things and hopefully to change them in a way that helps us avoid the situation in the first place.

Paul Cox

Current pilots are in the simulator every 6 months anyway. So if an accident report recommends that pilots receive extra training in an area then it can be included in the next sim session. The companies would frequently change parts of the operating procedures following accidents or events to keep everything as safe as possible.

Peter Burns

Aftermost airline crashes at least in the United States (or US aircraft),  the NTSB conducts a thorough investigation. Contrary to popular believe the NTSB is not responsible for creating new regulations etc. and so forth. What they do however, is make recommendations. These recommendations can be made to the FAA for regulation changes, to the aircraft manufacturer to replace or repair apart on their type or model, or to even companies to suggest remedial or advanced training for preventable circumstances. Also within the pilot community, most professionals make it a point to study aircraft accidents to make themselves better pilots; especially if the incident occurred in the same model or type that they fly. Both students and professionals alike (myself included) always find themselves in conversations after an aircraft incident has occurred. While sometimes additional training isn't available for various reasons, intelligent discussions with in the community are also helpful to improve awareness on issues we may encounter in flight. I'm sure the commercial guys will have a better answer than I do, but within the community that I know at the moment, that is how we do things.

Trevor Kincy

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