Were the pilots, captain Marvin D. Renslow and first officer Rebecca Lynne Shaw, at fault for leaving the auto-pilot on during icy conditions until the final moments of the deadly crash of Continental Flight 3407, February 12, 2009, in Buffalo, New York?
If you read the media headlines, such as The New York Daily News’ “Auto Doom: Experts say using Autopilot in icy weather sealed the plane’s fate,” Feb 16, or the lede in the Associated Press/MSNBC reports, Feb 15, following the tragedy that killed all 49 on-board and one person on the ground, you would naturally think so.
The AP lede stated, “The commuter plane that crashed near Buffalo was on autopilot until just before it went down in icy weather, indicating that the pilot may have violated federal safety recommendations and the airline’s own policy for flying in such conditions, an investigator said Sunday.”
However, in the Huffington Post version of the AP story, the pilot may have “ignored federal safety recommendations” instead of violating them.
Wow. Either way, it sounds like the pilots are to blame. The AP story continued: “ ’You may be able in a manual mode to sense something sooner than the autopilot can sense it,’ said Steve Chealander of the National Transportation Safety Board [NTSB], which also recommends that pilots disengage the autopilot in icy conditions.”
However, if you managed in all this blame-assigning verbiage, to make it as far as the 18th paragraph, the inconvenient and more complicated truth begins to emerge. It turns out that the issue about the autopilot being on during icy conditions is not, whole cloth, required by the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA).
According to the AP’s own story, “Federal Aviation Administration spokeswoman Laura Brown said the agency advises pilots to disengage the autopilot when ice is accumulating, but the guidance is not mandatory.”
Not mandatory? Then why does the lede paragraph blare that the pilots “may have violated federal safety recommendations” when paragraph 18 proves the AP reporter certainly knew the pilots could not violate something that isn’t mandatory?
What readers were missing in this and other early reports, slanted as they were by the ham-fisted suggestions of blame heaped upon the pilots, was really a disagreement between two federal agencies, the NTSB and the FAA.
The NTSB wants to have the FAA adopt the policy of always switching off the autopilot in icy conditions, whereas the FAA wants something more measured. So, when the lede paragraph stated that the pilots may have violated “federal safety regulations,” that sounds so ominous; the truth is they may have violated only the NTSB’s recommendation to the FAA—something the FAA themselves do not follow!
Shame on the AP and other media for giving the false impression of pilot error before all the facts are known…