Personal Injury Lawyers > Personal Injury Blog > Aviation Accidents > FAA Announces Progress in Commuter Airline Safety Post Buffalo Crash

Personal Injury Blog

FAA Announces Progress in Commuter Airline Safety Post Buffalo Crash

Close to a year after a devastating commuter airline crash in Buffalo, New York, the Federal Aviation Administration has presented a report on commuter airline safety. The report shows that progress has been made in meeting safety goals.

In February 2009, a Colgan Air commuter plane crashed near Buffalo, killing 49 passengers on the plane and at least one person on the ground. Commuter airlines are smaller carriers that ferry passengers on smaller regional routes that are not serviced by the national airlines. For the national carriers, it makes little financial sense to service these smaller regional routes, and therefore, they enter into an alliance with smaller carriers that transport passengers to the major hubs.  From these hubs, passengers then take the bigger airline to their destinations.

It is a common arrangement in the airline industry.  Most of the time, passengers who book tickets on national airliners may not even be aware that they will be flown to the major hubs on these smaller commuter airlines. However, the crash of Colgan Air in Buffalo exposed various safety loopholes in the manner in which commuter airlines operate their flights.

Voice recordings found after the Colgan Air crash indicate that the pilots were engaged in idle chatter in the minutes before the crash. The Colgan crash led to national criticism of the lack of federal oversight over these smaller airlines. A number of safety issues came to the forefront, including lack of pilot experience and training, poor pilot salaries and pilot fatigue. The National Transportation Safety Board was quick to react. During hearings conducted last year and attended by families of victims of the Buffalo crash, several of these points were thrown out.

Now, the Federal Aviation Administration has presented a report that says that new initiatives adopted after the Colgan crash have succeeded in increasing the safety of these commuter airlines. According to the report, these improvements occurred because of stronger government oversight of pilot training, as well as attempts by carriers to identify and monitor weak pilots. The report has graded airlines based on their safety enhancements, but does not name airlines.

The report says that close to 90 percent of the carriers that it investigated have a procedure to track pilots who lack experience.  These procedures also provided pilots with remedial training. The FAA also found 8 carriers with no proper procedures in place to identify and monitor problem pilots. However, most of these carriers have either stopped operations or have merged with other carriers. The report also says that 94 percent of passenger airlines are flown by operators that have implemented or intend to implement voluntary incident reporting processes that are recommended by the FAA.

The FAA report also expresses concern over cockpit indiscipline among pilots. California plane crash lawyers have been encouraged to note that the FAA plans to update a proposal on pilot training and experience standards. The agency will also continue to encourage pilot unions to work with pilots to eliminate cockpit distractions.

The Reeves Law Group is a law firm with offices throughout California dedicated exclusively to the representation of personal injury victims, including victims of aviation accidents. Please visit our website at trlglaw.com. If you desire a free consultation on a personal injury matter, please call us at (800) 644-8000 or email us.

The Reeves Law Group is not acting as legal counsel for any party in the matters discussed in this posting.

---