Show Notes
Marvin and Rebecca’s first two flights of the day were cancelled due to high winds at Newark so they both waited in the crew room until their company dispatch released them for flight 3407 at 6pm, 4 and a half hours after their initial report time. Certainly for Rebecca, it had been a long time since she had done more than nap in a chair. Their flight to Buffalo was due to take 53 minutes and they were carrying 45 passengers which, along with their two cabin attendants meant that they had 49 souls onboard their Q400 aircraft. The pilots’ performance was likely impaired because of fatigue but to what extent could not be conclusively determined. However, they boiled down to the flight crew’s failure to monitor airspeed, the flight crew’s failure to adhere to sterile cockpit procedures, the Captain’s failure to effectively manage the flight and Colgan Air’s inadequate procedures for airspeed selection, management during approaches in icing conditions and training. This is the story of Colgan Air Flight 3407.
A Bombardier Q400
The SAAB 340
The DH Dash 8
Examples of wing icing
Stills from the NTSB accident report
Stills from the NTSB accident report
Stills from the NTSB accident report
The wreckage of Flight 3407
Images under Creative Commons licence with thanks to Lord of the Wings, Bill Abbott, Steve Fitzgerald, NASA and the NTSB.
More from Plane Tales
With the influx of new Airbus airframes, Virgin needed more pilots and not just to occupy the right hand seat… there were opportunities for promotion to Captain much earlier than had been the norm. When I joined the time to command was about 8 years. Looking back I did my first sector with Virgin in July 1994 and it was now November 96, 2 years 4 months later and I was already starting my pre-command training.
We last spoke to Basam when he was doing his Jet Upset Training but now that he has his dream job it was appropriate that we should chat again on one of his London layovers. In particular, he is flying around a war zone which presents additional challenges to a civil airline pilot.
A flock of seagulls had chosen that moment to break ground from the grass beside the runway and fly across our path. They disappeared under the nose as we climbed away and cleaned the aircraft up… no noise of an impact but then we noticed the No 2 engine’s N1 vibration number was pulsing and reading a bit high. So starts another Tale from my flying logbook.
The next tale from my RAF Logbook, albeit now being filled with civilian flights for Virgin Atlantic Airways…