Buffalo, N.Y., crash puts regional airlines under microscope

Alex Lapointe, 25, a co-pilot for a regional airline, said he routinely lifts off knowing he has gotten less sleep than he needs. Once or twice a week, he said, he sees the captain next to him struggling to stay alert.

Neil Weston, also 25, went $100,000 into debt to train for a co-pilot's job that pays him $25,000 annually. He carries sandwiches in a cooler from his home in Dubuque, Iowa, bought his first uniform for $400 and holds out hope of tripling his salary by moving into the captain's seat and then up to a major carrier. Assuming, that is, the majors start hiring again.

Capt. Paul Nietz, 58, who recently retired from a regional airline, said his schedule wore him down and cost him three marriages. His workweek typically began with a 2:30 a.m. wake-up in northern Michigan and a 6 a.m. flight to his Chicago home bases. There, he would wait for his first assignment, a noon departure.

By the time he parked his aircraft at the last gate of the night, he was exhausted. But he would be due back at work eight hours and 15 minutes later. "At the very most, if you're the kind of person that could walk into a hotel room, strip and lay down, you might get four-and-a-half hours of sleep," he said. "And I was very senior. I was one of the fortunate guys."

The National Transportation Safety Board's (NTSB) inquiry into the Feb. 12 crash of Continental Connection Flight 3407 near Buffalo, N.Y., has raised concerns about 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.

In hearings last week in Washington, D.C., witnesses and safety officials raised questions about 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.

Training can vary

In 1997, a series of commuter crashes forced the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) to enact across-the-board regulations on the safety levels applying to regional carriers and major airlines.

Yet more than a decade later, major airlines, while depending on small carriers to carry ever more passengers, have no access to their contracted carriers' training plans and are not required to ensure the training they provide is the same as what customers expect on the big brand-name airlines.

And with regional planes displaying similar colors of the major airlines for which they fly, the public remains largely unaware of any disparity.

Tina Siniscalco, whose sister Mary Abraham died in the February crash, said during a break in the NTSB hearing that there is a great deal of confusion over who really operates the planes.

"You buy an airline ticket and you think you're on the best airline that's out there and that they're all following the same rules and regulations," Siniscalco said. "And then you find out they're not."

Colgan Air of Manassas, Va., operated that Continental Connection flight, flown by Capt. Marvin Renslow, 47, and co-pilot Rebecca Shaw, 24. Renslow commuted from his home near Tampa, Fla., to Newark, N.J., where the doomed flight originated, Shaw, who lived with her husband at her parents' home in Maple Valley, near Seattle, also commuted to Newark.

Shaw had worked for Colgan for 13 months. Colgan spokesman Joe Williams said Shaw's salary was $23,900. NTSB investigators calculated she was paid just over $16,000. Colgan officials testified that captains such as Renslow earn about $55,000 a year but later said captains earn about $67,000 a year.

When it comes to the major airlines, Paul Rice, vice president of the Air Line Pilots Association, said salaries vary between companies, but captains typically earn about $120,000 to $125,000. He said senior captains who fly internationally can earn about $180,000.

Safety levels still high

The renewed worries over commuter planes come as passenger airlines, regional and mainline, have achieved unprecedented levels of safety. Passenger deaths per million flights are down by more than two-thirds in the past 10 years. The 49 people on the Buffalo flight were the first in 30 months to die during a scheduled flight on a passenger carrier.

But of the six scheduled passenger flights that have crashed since Sept. 11, 2001, only one has been from a major carrier. Four, including the one near Buffalo, were commuter flights; a total of 133 people died on those flights. The fifth, a 50-year-old seaplane in Miami, was in neither category.

Not all commuter airlines are thought to have trouble adequately training their crews. Kirk Koenig, president of Expert Aviation Consulting, pointed to Sky West Airlines, based in Utah, as an example of a regional carrier with an excellent industry reputation.

And Roger Cohen, president of the Regional Airline Association, said there is only one airline industry with one level of rules. "There is no training gap; we have the exact same standards" as the big carriers, he said.

But while the same federal regulations for training apply to all airlines, most major airline companies "operate well above the minimum standards," said Bill Voss, president of the independent Flight Safety Foundation. "They have the luxury to hire highly qualified, highly experienced people."

"Crash pads"

One of the worries about commuter pilots, fatigue, is also a problem for the mainline carriers; in fact, in some operations, the big airlines are more vulnerable. They are conducting flights of 16 hours, across more time zones than a pilot can be expected to adapt to.

But regardless of whether training, fatigue or the cost-cutting that has hit the entire industry are ultimately determined to have contributed to the crash of Flight 3407, interviews with current and former regional pilots make clear the daily challenges they face.

Peek inside a crew lounge at midnight in Chicago, and one could easily find every recliner occupied by an off-duty aviator trying to sleep despite the whine of a janitor's vacuum cleaner.

In any city with a sizable air hub, a search of Craigslist for the term "crash pad" will turn up listings for rooms for rent, often for $200 a month or less, a short drive from an airport, where a dozen or more pilots, unable to afford hotels, may come and go, barely letting the mattresses cool.

Many regional pilots, paid entry-level wages, cannot afford even a crash pad.

"I know a guy who bought a car that barely ran and parked it in the employee lot at his base airport, and slept in his car six or seven times a month," said Frank Graham Jr., a former regional pilot and airline-safety director who runs a safety-consulting firm in Charlotte, N.C. Pilots for some regional airlines have been known to sleep in the aisles of their planes.

Like the two Flight 3407 pilots, who caught free rides in spare seats on planes from Florida and Seattle to get to their Newark flight, pilots at regional airlines routinely hopscotch across thousands of miles to get to work. Some live with their parents, as Shaw did. Others live near former bases of operations that were shut down because an employer went out of business or a route was dropped.

Aberration or the norm?

Sen. Byron Dorgan, D-N.D., chairman of the subcommittee on aviation, said Thursday that the panel would conduct a series of hearings next month. He said he was "stunned" by the Buffalo crew's lack of sleep and relative inexperience.

"We need to understand, is this an aberration, or are standards sufficiently lax or insufficient, or insufficiently enforced that we need to be concerned about a much broader set of issues?" he said.

There is nothing wrong with commuting cross-country to fly, said Roger Cohen, president of the Regional Airline Association, a trade group; he pointed out that Capt. Chesley Sullenberger, the US Airways pilot who ditched his crippled Airbus A320 in the Hudson River on Jan. 15, lives in Danville, Calif., and is based in Charlotte, N.C.

Cohen said he did not know what fraction of pilots commuted long distances, but that he didn't think it differed much between regional carriers and mainline carriers.

The FAA, while it enforces one set of safety standards, said it does not know how the safety of the commuter airlines compares to the safety of the big carriers. It is working on that question because of the planned Senate hearings.

The hearings will not be the first to address pilot fatigue. In 1995, under pressure from the NTSB and the Air Line Pilots Association, the FAA proposed shortening pilots' workdays and redefining duty hours to include the time spent getting from plane to hotel and back.

But the airlines, which deny pilot fatigue is a significant problem, opposed the changes, and the agency backed off.

Patrick Smith, an airline pilot and aviation writer who spent years at a regional carrier, acknowledged that fatigue is a murky problem, with many causes and varying effects on different pilots, that is difficult to nail down as the main cause of an accident.

"But the fact that you can't make this easy and direct link isn't reason to ignore the problem," he said. "Obviously it's there."

For Weston, the pilot from Dubuque, life in the regional air business is a little like being an extra in a movie. The planes he flies some days are labeled United Connection, others Delta Express. But his employer is an airline few people have heard of: Republic.

It is a quick hop by air but a six-hour drive from home to his base in Indianapolis, where he stays overnight with an aunt before starting his four-day workweek. His workdays run 12 hours, sometimes 16.

He said this was a dream job for him and many of his fellow pilots, even though some have to hold down second jobs to make ends meet.

Asked if he also flew for pleasure, he laughed.

"I can't afford it," he said.

This article was reported by David M. Halbfinger, Matthew L. Wald and Christopher Drew, and written by Halbfinger.

Material from McClatchy Newspapers, The Associated Press and The Seattle Times archive is included in this report.