Pilots on the loose
In her final awful minutes, Rebecca Shaw, the co-pilot on ill-fated Continental Connection Flight 3407, ran through female stereotypes with blinding speed. On its front page, The Wall Street Journal ran her comments in a huge block of damning type:
"I"ve never seen icing conditions. I've never deiced...I've neve experienced any of that. I don't want to have to experience that and make those kinds of calls. You know I'd have freaked out. I'd have, like, seen this much ice and thought, oh my gosh, we were going to crash."
Admissions of inadequacy and inexperience, served up in a stream-of-consciousness babble: My first reaction to the transcript was that Rebecca Shaw had set women back, like, y'know, 30 years. But Shaw was at least verbalizing her fear and concern; the pilot, Capt. Marvin Renslow, seemed oblivious to the need for corrective action. Both Renslow -- who flunked five pilot tests in five years, according to the Wall Street Journal -- and Shaw paid for their inattention with their lives.
The chattering, young Shaw sounds especially silly in the transcript. But the more I think about her, the more sympathetic I feel: She admitted that she lacked experience and training she should have had, while flying under the wing of an older pilot. Alas, his skill and training were questionable.
Shaw, the pretty co-pilot, can so easily be held up to ridicule or blame. But don't let her nervous chatter divert you from the way Colgan Inc. cut corners and cost, ultimately at a terrible price.
