Laughed at “memorize every stain on the carpet in every plane in the fleet”. Nicely stated.
The weather: the weather system that had produced a lot of snow had moved on. A careful examination of the videos will show some blue sky mixed with scattered to broken clouds. Note that some of the videos show the airplane some distance from the runway so not a low ceiling or low visibility. The surface wind. Who cares. Other airplanes landed successfully.
Did the wingtip scrape the ground? Who cares? Scraping the wingtip on the ground does not break the wing off at the fuselage. The wing broke because the right main gear transferred loads to the wing root that exceeded the design limits of the wing.
At Reno the crosswind runway is not long enough to accomodate large airplanes. I have watched many airplanes including 737’s land in direct crosswinds with gusts over 50. Piece of cake if you know what your’re doing. Probably significantly over company limits. Two opposing forces. The airline doesnt want pilots exceeded crosswind limits but they dislike ever more the phone call “we’re in Sacramento with a load of Reno passengers”. keep the company and the passengers happy and don’t break the airplane. A delicate balance done all over the world thousands of times a day.
In my DC9 days the conditions at Montreal would be completely routine. A Beech 18 on an icy runway in a crosswind a whole nother story.
2 Likes
My first experience with a female pilot was watching a 14 year old girl fly solo in a glider. Winch tow. I was a pre solo Piper J3 student. The winch tow in the glider scared the hell out of me. Routine for the girl.
Between jobs I was instructing part time in Cherokees and Cessna’s. A gentleman who I had been flying with in his personal airplane asked me to teach his wife to fly. We started in the 152 and then she bought her own 172. I had my own unique agenda which included a lot of cross wind landings which she learned to handle very well. She probably had 60 hours when she took her check ride but she was performing at a commercial pilot skill level.
Decades ago I had the honor of conducting a special program for the graduates of the Navy
Test Pilot program. This was done in the Russian Sukhoi SU29, a taildragger with some quirks. There were something around 12-15 pilots, all got two flights. A lot of spin work including upright and inverted flat spins. There was one person in that group who was so much better than the next best that it was an embaressment to the rest She was six ft tall with long blonde hair. I was later told she was overhauling Corvette engines when she was 16 years old. I have always wondered what path her career took.
1 Like
Yeah! Every single person who crashed an airplane was a DEI hire! US Airways knew they had too many Americans on-staff and hired a Sullenberger to increase their German diversity. United hired a Haynes because of a shortage of Welshmen. Even Bob Hoover, who crashed 17 airplanes(!!!), was a DEI hire from a lack of Dutchmen.
And AJ is right–I beg to differ that Bob Hoover was “FAA Qualified”. 17 crashes tells me he shouldn’t have been allowed anywhere near an airplane. Thank Goodness the FAA revoked his credentials.
Commander1,
You need to differentiate between wartime flying, test pilot flying, and exhibition flying. Hoover never crashed a perfectly good civilian aircraft.
Point is that UNLESS there is some very improbable cause yet to be discovered, then the probable cause from all the video and flight data points to pilot error. Not sure why that makes people upset.
1 Like
Badmouthing Bob Hoover is not a good way to win friends and influence people. It however a confession of ignorance.
2 Likes
Yep, NOTAM as Notices to Air Missions absolutely needed to be changed back to Airmen. Because only men have to read them?
Art, the PF didn’t slam a perfectly good airplane into the ground, he/she FLEW a perfectly good airplane into the ground/runway. In all my years of worldwide military, charter, corporate, and airline flying, dating back to 1969, I have never seen anyone do what the PF did. No airplane is designed to be actively flown into the ground. That is called crashing. To watch what the PF did was stunning.
1 Like
Are you a CFI ?
If so, is your focus while teaching “carpet stains” ?
Who’s looking for traffic while teaching ?
Traffic is sarcasm at your 12 o’clock 25,000 feet. Do you have it in sight?
1 Like
Yep, judging from the videos, he/she FLEW a perfectly good airplane into the ground/runway. “I” use the word slam whenever I see anyone obviously exceed what the landing gear can arrest.
That’s not the way we teach radio communications. 
Find a good CFI and enjoy learning !!!
Good luck to you.
Roger, roger! Gonna be interesting to see what the G-force was at impact. And, Canadair and the rest of us will know what the ultimate limits of the RJ’s landing gear is.
Bob Hoover was the epitome of what a pilot is. Legend has it he stole an ME-109 from an German airfield during WW II. He was a WW II fighter pilot. test pilot at Edwards after the war, corporate certification and demo pilot, and air show entertainer, among other things. His medical certificate was stolen from him by a couple of jealous FAA thugs. It is evident you have no clue about Bob Hoover.
What? Huh? I should get to know the facts before I bash someone? What country are YOU from? That’s not how we do things here in America anymore.
For the record, Sully, Haynes, and Hoover were all awesome pilots, despite crashing things. My point was about jumping to conclusions based upon the “obvious facts” rather than getting educated…
No sarcasm, I am glad Russ kept the comments. This was a really good read.
Yes, we should all wait a year for the final report to come out on what happened - but that’s asking an awful lot of mere mortals. In the meantime we all researched the field, the winds, the conditions, and we all saw the videos. A year from now we will all read the final report and find out how right or wrong our guts were.
The crew was newer than most. That is the unavoidable result of our seniority system. More experienced crew fly heavier birds. [I will go out on a limb and agree with others that it is likely (not confirmed) that the first officer was the pilot flying.] The winds were gusty, but not dangerous. The visibility was not an issue. It would seem to be one of two things: (1) either the plane was sufficiently compromised that it could not withstand an acceptable landing (corrosion, fatigue, previously undiscovered Achilles heal), or (2) the landing exceeded the limits of an acceptably good aircraft.
From my armchair at 30,000 feet, scenario (1) although a possibility, seems unlikely. Scenario (2) could be caused by either (a) outside agents - such as wind shear - that sucked the lift out from under the wings at the last moment or (b) the crew failed to arrest the descent rate before touchdown (either they flew it into the ground with no flare, or they got too slow before landing and they dropped it on the ground).
Option (a) seems highly unlikely since the prevailing weather was not the right type to produce wind shear sufficient to crash a regional jet. Option (b) could have been caused by any number of human factors. (i) I might go out on a limb and suggest that a newly minted flyer stressed by the wintertime conditions could have been in a hurry to put the plane down and rushed the touch down. (ii) I might also ask if the blowing snow on the runway surface might create any visual illusions that would confuse a newly minted pilot as to how high above the asphalt they really were. I grew up driving in that part of the world and am familiar with white roads and blowing snow only a foot or so above the ground making a unique visual environment. Or maybe they just, you know, (you fill in the blank). We’ll never know why they didn’t haul back on the yoke at the precise moment when we all intuitively know to do it.
Regardless of what thought process guided the actions of the PF, if the plane was airworthy (and I’m assuming it was), there is no explanation I can fathom that can justifiably explain the outcome of this landing as not being the pilot’s fault.
I would like to know for certain who was the pilot flying. Not for any political or discriminatory purposes, but to further understand the tools that that individual brought to work that day. If it was the younger first officer, I would like to know in what part of the world did they do their training? If they did all of their training somewhere like Florida or Phoenix and not Chicago or Minneapolis, how much experience had this individual accrued on this route in winter storm conditions vs. cold and clear?
I also think it is valid to ask about legitimate training and performance scores by both crew members. The current environment has led to much distrust in the system. If it becomes clear that the PF simply flew the plane into the ground, was this an amazingly capable pilot who was momentarily confused by a white on white illusion, or was this an individual who struggled with eye-hand coordination when timing the landing flare? Inquiring minds want to know.
It really has gone WAY over your head. WAY WAY over.
Just in case you are a very literal person:
While flying airplanes, instructing or not, like most pilots I look outside a lot and study the carpet rarely. This is a literary device called humor or exaggeration used to make a point. It is a common literary device used in books, short form articles, and forum postings. See the other post about Bob Hoover wrecking numerous airplanes for another example of this.
1 Like
Third choice: They banged the plane on hard enough to reveal a weakened wing spar, so both a compromised airplane and bad landing.
1 Like
You missed it. Claiming that Hoover “was a DEI hire from a lack of Dutchmen” is dog-whistle code for <sarcasm> on.
“My point was about jumping to conclusions based upon the “obvious facts””
We already knew the facts of Hoover.
We were responding to someone who was using them out of context.
Sully, Haynes, and Hoover did not crashed perfectly good airplanes.
Probable cause here is that a perfectly good airplane was guided right into the ground. The context here is that the PIC probably caused people to be in peril, not saved them from it.