Colgan Air Flight 3407, and why victims are not lawmakers.

There is a severe pilot shortage going on, particularly for regional airlines. You may have felt it, if you live in less populated areas, as the availability of flights is reduced.

There are many reasons this is happening. Low wages, high education costs, and debt. And also, Colgan Air Flight 3407.

Flight 3407 crashed on February 12, 2009 in New York state, killing all people on board the plane and one in a house, bringing the total deaths to 50. This crash was caused by a stall which was incorrectly handled by the pilots. But, if you read about the incident, you will find a story of exhausted pilots buried under all of the suggestions of inexperience.

What does this have to do with a pilot shortage?

When something horrible happens and people die, we want their deaths to have meaning. Somebody must be to blame, or some problem fixed so it doesn't happen again. Something good must come from the tragedy.

Airplane crashes are horrible things, and in this case, the effort to attribute meaning to the deaths meant that the victim’s families (and others) pressured Congress to do something so that such an accident would never happen again. Because some of the investigation suggested crew fatigue and pilot error, Congress enacted laws requiring airlines to hire pilots with a higher number of flight hours.

Problem: Both of the pilots on Flight 3407 had more than the flight hours Congress now required of commercial pilots. This new law wouldn’t have solved the problem for Flight 3407, but it has created another problem in that there is now a pilot shortage.

Problem: By requiring more flight hours, Congress effectively made it very difficult to find pilots to fly commercially, and this is being felt by regional airlines because they are unable to find enough qualified pilots to fill the slots of their senior pilots who are moving on to the major airlines (where pay and prospects are better). Flight 3407 was a regional airline. Again, the new law would not help that specific situation but exacerbate it. It has likely made the situation worse.

The new law complicates already cumbersome rules for pilots trying to earn the certificates needed to fly for an airline. Some regional airlines (Great Lakes Airlines) are even removing seats from their aircraft to qualify under a different set of rules so they could avoid this hassle and solve the problem of finding pilots to fly routes.

If Congress really wanted to pass a law that would have helped in the Colgan Air Flight accident, it would have looked something like this:

• Airlines must base their pilots in the city where they live, and pay them enough to live there so that they do not have to commute cross-country to start their duty rounds and be sleep-deprived and exhausted.

  
  

• Airlines must pay their pilots enough that they don’t have to work additional jobs (exhaustion factor) and live in crashpads, just to get by.

Congress would have done well to watch Frontline’s Flying Cheap documentary, inspired by the incident. And they would have also been wise to consider that the victim’s families were grieving, and that perhaps they weren’t the best ones to ask what should be done. Their opinion was going to be from an emotional place of pain, and not a carefully thought-out place of logic.

I want to say that every time something bad happens, it doesn’t mean there was a law that should have been in place to prevent it from happening. Bad things happen, regardless of laws. Accidents and evil don’t follow laws. You can’t outlaw human error. Some laws that have come out of tragedy have been good (e.g. Amber Alerts), but in an age of Twitter and TV, lawmakers seem to be more motivated to make people feel good in a soundbite than they are with creating good laws.

Imagine if a lawmaker had said to those grieving families “I’m sorry for your loss, but this law wouldn’t have saved your loved one.”

It’s much easier to pass a law that makes victims feel like their tragedy had a purpose, even if it is a bad law, but the job of Congress isn’t to be that of a counselor. Emotions make for terrible laws. Emotional decisions often lead to government bloat (Department of Homeland Security, anyone?).

Sometimes, death is without discernible meaning. Sometimes, there is no recourse to circumvent mourning than to hit it head on and slog through, rather than get a sense of justification for meaningless death through laws. I told my friend once that if “something terrible were to happen to me, don’t you dare try to memorialize me with some stupid law.”

I mean that.

I don’t want my legacy to be one of red tape.