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.
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?