From the outside looking in, it appears that there IS a widespread lack of discipline and leadership in the cockpits at many of these smaller carriers; but when you have 300 hour CFI's being mentored by 1800 hour captains that were hired as 300 hour CFI's to be mentored by 1800 hour captains, well, it's not hard to see how the proverbial experience gene pool could be watered down a bit.
During the last decade the Regional Airline business had such a huge expansion that they hired and promoted some to captain before they had accumulated enough experience as an FO under a grizzled veteran to acquire the discipline and humility necessary to handle the responsibility being handed them (50+ trusting souls in the back of a $20 million airplane). As recently as 5 years ago I was predicting that accidents/incidents like this would happen due to the watered down experience level and lack of professional conduct that can be attributed to it.
I can't help but imagine visiting a new hire or recurrent class and saying this:
Jefferson City MO
Lexington KY
Buffalo NY
Charleston WV
?? ??
Pay attention to the task at hand.
Talk about your job and life some other time.
There are people in the back of the airplane that expect nothing less.
RC
You get what you pay for. These days people will give anything for a dollar off on their plane ticket. When I was in new hire at my current company they asked that we not wear our uniform if we went to apply for wellfare... because the company thought it was embarassing. Nevermind that I thought it was embarassing that we qualified for it in the first place. Companies that pay and treat employees well are put at a major disadvantage to the ones that don't becuase the passengers don't care and just buy whoever is cheaper anyway. That means the mainline carriers contract with the cheaper regionals. Regionals that do anything to better themselves have to cost more... which means they don't get the flying.
It is a tremendous credit to the pilots at the regionals right now that there haven't been a lot more instances like this or worse. The professionalism and integrity is a very big part of it.
You've got guys making essentially minimum wage or less doing all they can to keep the operation safe. The average regional pilot has a lot less experience, a lot less pay, a lot less rest and a lot more work than a pilot at a major. Professionalism is all that keeps everything working together.
There is a whole lot more going on here than just young pilots. Unfortunately, some guys have a hard time acting like professionals when no one thinks of them as such. The company doesn't care, the public sure as hell doesn't care. But the majority of the pilots at the regionals work hard and maintain their ethos regardless out of professionalism. The companies only care if it's legal. It's completely left to the pilots to keep it safe.
This accident and its lack of professional conduct wasn't because of lack of experience. It was because of lack of professionalism. I'm going to guess that you haven't read the operational factors section yet (if you've read any of these at all, I know it's a lot to wade through). The FO in this case had 3,500 hours. Almost 2,000 in the CRJ and 1,000 of PIC (don't know what the PIC was in). He had been F/E on C-5 galaxies and was still active in the Air Guard as a "training and education manager." The CA had 9,500 hours and was a check airman. The CA had just started his 11th year with the company.
So you've got a captain who's been around over 10 years and an FO who has military training and a decent amount of flight time. I think this is pretty far off from your idea of an inexperienced crew Matt. There are pilots at mainline carriers with less experience than the FO had. They were complacent, that's it. Add to that... if the captain had not touched the flaps, continued with the config warning he caused or promptly aborted instead of making changes on takeoff roll they would have taken off or aborted fine and we'd have never heard about it. And still most won't. Honestly, how many of you knew about this before reading it here? This incident happened in January.
I know a lot of people are caught in the talking during taxi (which I also didn't like one bit), but I'm a bit held up by the decision to do a post V1 abort for a config warning you caused yourself (and thus should know what it is about). But in either case I don't believe that it's actual lack of experience that is the cause.
As late as it is I think I'll call it a night at that, while I can still hope that I've made some sense.
