Posted on 06/13/2005 8:45:15 AM PDT by TheOtherOne
Joking Pilots in Commuter Jet Crash Wanted to 'have a Little Fun' by Climbing to 41,000 Feet
Published: Jun 13, 2005 WASHINGTON (AP) - Two pilots, in a jovial mood as they flew an empty commuter jet, wanted to "have a little fun" by taking the plane to an unusually high altitude last October, only to realize as the engines failed that they were not going to make it, according to transcripts released Monday.
The plane, which the two were ferrying from Little Rock, Ark. to Minneapolis, crashed and both Capt. Jesse Rhodes and First Officer Peter Cesarz perished.
The cockpit voice recording, released by the National Transportation Safety Board at the start of a three-day hearing into the Oct. 14, 2004 accident, revealed how the pilots cracked jokes and decided to "have a little fun" and fly to 41,000 feet - the maximum altitude for their 50-seat plane. Most commuter jets fly at lower altitudes.
"Man, we can do it, 41-it," said Cesarz at 9:48 p.m. A minute later, Rhodes said, "40 thousand, baby."
Two minutes later, "There's 41-0, my man," Cesarz said. "Made it, man."
At 9:52 p.m., one of the pilots popped a can of Pepsi and they joked about drinking beer. A minute later, Cesarz said, "This is the greatest thing, no way."
But at 10:03 p.m., the pilots reported their engine had failed. Five minutes later, they said both engines had failed and they wanted a direct route to any airport.
The transcript recounts their increasingly desperate efforts to restart the engines and regain altitude. They tried to land at the Jefferson City, Mo., airport but by 10:14 p.m., it was obvious they wouldn't reach it.
"We're not going to make it, man. We're not going to make it," Cesarz said. The plane crashed in a residential neighborhood of Jefferson City. No one was injured on the ground.
Accident investigators are examining how well the pilots were trained - a key safety question as the number of regional jets keeps growing.
The crash involved a Bombardier regional jet plane operated by Pinnacle Airlines, an affiliate of Northwest Airlines. Like many regional carriers, Pinnacle is growing rapidly as it teams up with a traditional network airline looking to offer more seats to more places.
Memphis, Tenn.-based Pinnacle grew by 700 percent in the past five years, according to Phil Reed, its marketing vice president. During that time, it switched its fleet from propeller-driven planes to small turbojets, known as regional jets, or RJs.
The number of regional jets rose to 1,630 last year from 570 in 2000, the Federal Aviation Administration says. The question of whether government safety inspectors can keep up with such rapid changes in the airline industry was raised last week in a Transportation Department inspector general's report.
Jet engines work differently at higher altitudes, and it's unclear whether the relatively inexperienced Pinnacle pilots were aware that they had to be more careful in the thin air at 41,000 feet, the maximum altitude for their plane.
According to FAA transcripts of air-to-ground conversations, an air traffic controller in Kansas City told the two pilots it was rare to see the plane flying that high.
"Yeah, we're actually ... we don't have any passengers on board, so we decided to have a little fun and come up here," one of the pilots said. The transcripts don't identify whether Jesse Rhodes or Cesarz made the statement.
First one, then the other engine shut down. The last contact that controllers had with the crew was at 9,000 feet, when the pilot reported an airport beacon in sight.
At the hearing, NTSB investigators plan to delve into the plane's flight limits and the proper recovery techniques when engines fail. They also want to know if the pilots knew those procedures and to learn the engine's performance characteristics at high altitudes.
On June 2, the FAA issued a special bulletin clarifying what steps pilots need to take to restart an engine when there's a dual engine failure, agency spokeswoman Laura Brown said.
David Stempler, president of the Air Travelers Association, said the issue may be reckless pilots rather than inadequate training or improper recovery procedures.
"This is more a story of pilots having time on their hands and playing with things in the cockpit that they shouldn't," he said.
Flying, he said, is as boring as truck driving most of the time.
"This was boredom and experimentation, these guys experimenting with things they had no business doing," Stempler said.
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On the Net:
National Transportation Safety Board: http://www.ntsb.gov
AP-ES-06-13-05 1117EDT
There are no Old Bold Pilot's!
A good friend of mine is a ex-Delta Captain. He related to me that the pilots' union strongly urged/cajoled the airline to not exceed FL 410 so that the guys up front (or at least one of them) would not have to wear the humorously disfiguring full face mask. He related to me that this was a common agreement across the majors -- that it was common practice to avoid altitudes requiring one of the crew to don the mask.
the genesis of the 'policy' was that the masks, as you know, if worn for a while leave deep lines in your face, and thus they sought to avoid cruising at FL 410 and above.
I never flew commercial - so you know better than I. I just know the stories he told.
Not all pilots are intelligent it seems.
Let's see, almost doesn't count in.... ;)
Wouldn't take much
Got somethin' against Boeing Guys?
You should, they build those things in Everett yah know! :)
Back on this, how easy is it to induce a stall a cruise at FL 41. Converting TAS to IAS, 120 KIAS gives you 208 KTAS. .8 Mach, I would guess would give you a pretty good margin still.
I'd be curious what the control deflections looked like during all of this.
I've been involved with civil aviation for most of my 35 years, from riding in the back of Cessnas as a toddler, to CFI, to cube dwelling engineer. During this time, 9 people that I either knew, worked with, or had met hanging around the field have bit it. Only one was for something other than blatent idiocy, sucidal idiocy, or percipitated from a mechanical failure. And she probably had the old -172 front seat slip.
Needless to say, I get a bit hung up on trying to make sense out of these. And with engines like the FJ-33 comming into production, high altitude-high subsonic issues are going to be facts of life for more and more of us.
Update?
By Alan Levin, USA TODAY Tue Jun 14, 6:46 AM ET
Two pilots snickered and joked in the final minutes before losing control of a passengerless jet last fall in a crash that is the focus of a three-day government hearing on training and safety involving popular regional jets.
Capt. Jesse Rhodes, 31, and First Officer Peter Cesarz, 23, committed several violations of airline rules during their flight in October from Little Rock to Minneapolis, according to a cockpit recording released Monday.
The two men died after taking the jet to its highest possible altitude, losing control and crashing when the engines apparently locked up and wouldn't restart.
The Pinnacle Airlines jet slammed into a house 2½ miles short of an airport in Jefferson, Mo. The pilots' gleeful moods turned suddenly dire as repeated efforts to restart their engines failed and it became clear they couldn't reach an airport, according to the cockpit recording.
"Aw (expletive)," Rhodes says three seconds before the crash. "We're gonna hit houses, dude."
No one on the ground was injured.
The accident drew little attention last year, but the
National Transportation Safety Board is holding a hearing to study broader safety questions it raised:
• Jet engines are designed to restart if they stop at high altitude, but the General Electric jets apparently froze. The pilots attempted to restart the engines four times over 20 minutes without success.
The GE engines are on 970 jets, including the Bombardier CRJ-100 and CRJ-200, popular regional jets. GE spokeswoman Deb Case said the engine met all federal standards and the company does not believe the engine has ever frozen in flight.
• Training and pilot manuals at Pinnacle, which flies regional flights for Northwest Airlines, did little to address the dangers of flying at 41,000 feet, the altitude at which Rhodes and Cesarz lost control.
The Air Line Pilots Association, the union that represented the pilots, said in a statement that rapidly growing airlines such as Pinnacle need to do more to train the young pilots who are increasingly flying high-powered regional jets.
Pinnacle disowned the actions of the pilots. "It's beyond belief that a professional airline crew would act in that manner," said Thomas Palmer, the airline's former training manager.
The NTSB will not issue a cause for the crash for many months.
The pilots were called on duty to fly an empty jet from Little Rock to Minneapolis. From the start of the flight, their actions were unusual. They climbed so quickly after takeoff that they activated the jet's safety warning system. Then they switched seats, which is forbidden by the airline.
They had been assigned an altitude of 33,000 feet by their airline's dispatcher but asked controllers for permission to climb to 41,000, the jet's highest altitude. That also was a violation of company policy.
After reaching that height, they joked about celebrating with a beer. Within three minutes, they had lost so much speed that the jet plunged out of control. The loss of control was so violent it snuffed out the engines.
After reading this last article, I think these guys needed a bit of the same advice. They CLEARLY were fully aware they were goofing off. The job is dangerous enough without adding unprofessional joy rides to the mix. Almost nothing good ever comes from flights flown with the mindset these guys exhibited. Based on all the company regs they violated, would you really want them flying in your company? ALPA is making a lukewarm attempt at shifting the blame to airline training, but all the formal training in the world doesn't count for much when guys willingly and repeatedly break the rules. As a professional pilot and ALPA member, I find this whole incident embarrassing.
Big boys and their toys....
Interesting. This makes it sounds like they lost control causing the engines to go out, not the other way around. Any thoughts on whether anything related to the altitude could have caused the loss of speed?
Well thankfully no one on the ground had to pay a price for their folly.... sad thing is, I doubt either one of them had any idea what they were doing was risky.
My first aerobatic instructor told me....
"Don't shine your ass, it'll kill ya!"
That's what I think when I'm ready to do something stupid.
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