Original subtitles

February the 12th, 2009.

Just outside Buffalo, New York.

Gear down.

Looks alive.

Gear's down.

Jesus Christ!

The airplane entered an aerodynamic stall.

It did not recover.

It was one of the grizzliest, nastiest scenes

that I think I've seen.

The crash of Continental Connection

Flight 3407 would be one of the NTSB's

most important in decades,

and would see a grieving father

fight for changes to the laws governing small airlines.

I'm focused and determined to change what exists,

and not have another dad sitting here.

Mayday, mayday.

Continental Connection Flight 3407

operated by Colgan Air, is en route

from Newark, New Jersey to Buffalo, New York.

It's been a busy flight for Captain Marvin Renslow.

He's providing guidance to a new first officer,

Rebecca Shaw, a former flight instructor from Seattle.

Bless you.

Shaw's only been with the airline

for just over a year.

She must decide if she now wants to become a captain.

I don't know what I want to do with the upgrade.

It depends where I'm based.

Well, think of it this way.

If you stayed on the queue, obviously you're not

making the captain rank.

Right.

But you may have a better quality of life

with regards to buying a house, having a schedule--

Shaw trained to be a first officer

on the plane they're flying now,

a Canadian-made Bombardier Q400.

It's a twin engine turboprop,

popular with regional airlines.

The 45 passengers have had a long night.

Their plane was held up for two hours at Newark,

a delay considerably longer than their journey.

Flight 3407 is heading northwest over upstate New York.

The trip is only 53 minutes.

Visibility is poor, and there's a forecast of snow

and moderate winds in Buffalo.

Just some water, please.

Ellyce Kausner is a student at Florida Coastal

School of Law in Jacksonville.

She's on her way to visit her family in Buffalo.

She had five nieces and nephew at the time,

and they had a love luncheon at the kids' school,

a couple of the nephews, and they both wanted Aunt Elly

to be their guest.

Any excuse to come home, and she came home.

She talked to all of us from Newark.

Hey.

She called us from the lounge.

Yeah, it's been over two hours.

She was p.o.'d because of the delay.

Folks from the flight deck, your first officer speaking.

It looks like at this time we're about 10, maybe 15

minutes outside of Buffalo.

Weather in Buffalo is pretty foggy.

Snowing a little bit there.

I'd like to make sure everyone remains

in their seats so the flight attendants

can prepare the cabin for arrival.

Thank you.

Colgan 3407, descend and maintain, 2300.

Okay, down to 2300.

Colgan 3407.

Let's do a descend checklist, please.

We can do the approach checklist along with it.

Sure.

Bug set.

Set.

GPWS landing flap selected, 15 degrees.

The pilots go through a list of settings

for the plane to continue its landing approach.

Lights are off.

Yup.

Passengers can already glimpse the lights

of Buffalo's suburbs.

Clarence Center is on the approach path

for aircraft landing at Buffalo's airport.

Gear down.

Looks alive. - Gear's down.

All right.

Flaps 15?

Extending the flaps provides more lift,

allowing the plane to slow to its final approach scene.

Uh ...

Jesus Christ!

Suddenly, the control column start to shake.

The Q400 is slipping out of control.

Captain Renslow struggles to keep his plane flying.

But it seems to have a mind of its own.

The gear!

Should the gear be up?

Gear up!

Oh, damn!

Oh, we're down.

The plane crashes into a house

at 6038, Long Street.

At air traffic control in Buffalo,

Flight 3407 disappears from radar.

Check Colgan Air.

See if he's on yet.

What's his call sign?

Colgan, 3407.

Nope, I don't have him.

Do you see anything out there?

Nothing.

All right.

Call the fire department.

I will never forget the dispatcher's words.

Plane crash, house on fire.

I immediately got my shoes on and my coat on.

Got in my truck, and started heading down the driveway.

Firefighters don't have far to go.

6038 Long Street, home of the Wielinski family,

is less than a block from the Clarence Center station.

As I turned towards the village,

the whole village was aglow.

You could see the smoke, you could see the flame.

Karen Wielinski and her daughter

make it out of their house alive,

but her husband, Douglas, is killed.

My initial reaction was there was no way

that somebody made it out,

but the EMS division reported that they had two people,

and they were taking them to the hospital.

And I said well, which firefighters are they?

And they said they're not firefighters, chief.

They're survivors from the house.

I actually physically had to go to the ambulance

and look inside for myself to believe.

Firefighters have never seen a blaze like this.

If you've ever gone to a bonfire and stood five feet

from it and you couldn't take it anymore,

that's what it felt like from 100 feet away.

The height of it was just unbelievable,

obviously because of the fuel that was probably added to it

and the debris area was very large.

It was a very, very horrific sight.

We live in town, when the plane went down

right down the road, my son was driving home

from a soccer game, and went right by the plane crash

and called me up, and said there's a plane down on Clarence.

Never really entered our brain that it was Elly's plane.

Flight 3407 has crashed eight kilometers short

of Buffalo airport.

All 49 passengers and crew are dead,

including Captain Marvin Renslow,

and first officer Rebecca Shaw.

But many more people could easily have been killed.

When you picture a house, and to see a plane

on top of this house, no more house left, no more plane,

only the tail section, you're asking yourself

how in god's creation did this happen,

and not wipe the whole block out?

The next call was again from my son,

said in fact it was Elly's plane.

And he said Dad, there's no survivors.

At which point, my wife shrieked,

and just hit the ground.

Chris said he had never heard his mother

make a sound like that, and I hope he never does again.

So that's when I knew that she was gone,

and that was probably within 45 minutes of the accident.

The scene in the morning

is one of utter devastation.

Clint Crookshanks from the NTSB.

Can I start poking around?

Clint Crookshanks is one of the first

investigators on the case.

When we arrived on scene, there was a fire still burning.

Turns out it was from a gas line

that had been broken in the house,

that the firemen would put the fire out,

and it would reignite every couple of minutes.

It was one of the grizzliest, nastiest scenes

that I think I've seen.

Flight 3407 may have been a small plane,

but it's the worst crash in the US in more than seven years.

It will become one of the NTSB's

most important investigations.

The fire at the crash site of Flight 3407

continues to burn, preventing investigators

from examining the wreckage.

The airplane had crashed into a house,

and then it had burned all night long,

so all the debris was basically in the house.

Our concern was that we're losing evidence.

It's perishable, and if we can't get in there

and get the fire out, then we're not able

to maybe get a hold of evidence that might help us

during the investigation.

Clint Crookshanks urgently needs

to recover the black box flight recordings,

which could contain valuable clues about the accident.

We knew that the recorders were in the tail part

of the airplane.

Ordinarily, investigators don't go near

a crash site that's still burning,

but if the black boxes can't be rescued,

they may never find out what brought down Flight 3407.

We started looking around, and poking around

into the wreckage, and actually found out where they were.

Okay, whoa.

It's probably in here, okay?

The access panel is on the other side

so we're gonna have to cut a hole right there.

Okay?

The fire department produced a chop saw.

We were able to cut a hole in the side of the fuselage,

and go in and grab the recorders and pull them out.

All right, that should do it.

To the immense relief of all,

the recorders are undamaged.

Once we took the recorders out of the airplane,

we put them on the jet, and they were flown

back to Washington DC to our headquarters.

Now investigators are faced with a new hurdle.

What little is left of the aircraft

is hopelessly jumbled together with human remains,

and debris from the house.

It all burned and settled into the basement,

so we had probably ten feet of debris

that we had to dig through in order to recover

all of the airplane.

Authorities wonder how they can salvage

any useful evidence from this chaos.

They get invaluable assistance from an unusual source.

A group of students learning to process crime scenes

is enlisted to separate human remains

from the rest of the debris.

They were graduate students from a local college,

forensic anthropology students,

and this was good experience for them to come dig through

wreckage like this, and look for human remains.

The landing gear over there, please.

It's dirty, painstaking work,

but it frees up investigators to concentrate

on the aircraft ruins.

We were all on our hands and knees

with brooms, with little shovels,

scooping out debris, identifying it as to house debris,

or airplane debris, and then putting it in different piles.

The first question for me as a structures engineer

is to figure out if the whole airplane

made it to the scene of the crash.

The wreckage is carefully studied.

To determine if the plane's four corners,

nose, tail, and both wingtips, are present.

If we find all four corners of the airplane,

then we know that there's no inflight breakup,

there was nothing that departed the airplane

during the flight that may have caused the accident.

One wing has been consumed by fire.

The other is shattered into pieces.

Hey, have a look at this.

But investigators are gradually finding

what they'd been searching for.

Oh yeah.

It's the last piece.

It wasn't until several days into the investigation

as we were scraping away some of the debris

that we actually found evidence

of the left wing and the nose.

Investigators now have all the pieces

they need to conclude that the entire plane

is at the crash site.

Whatever caused the disaster was not the result

of a breakup inflight.

The tragedy of Flight 3407 is under intense scrutiny

at the NTSB offices in Washington.

Officials there try to determine

if some kind of malfunction caused the crash.

On this particular accident, we knew it was

a landing accident, so if we wanted to check

the aircraft's performance, and then also we check

for flight control continuity.

Much of this responsibility falls

to Scott Warren.

My role in the investigation was to be

the systems group chairman for the safety board,

so I was in charge of looking

at all of the aircraft systems.

Warren analyzes the aircraft's

cockpit voice recorder, or CVR, to determine

if there were any indications of a problem in the cockpit.

Prepare the cabin for arrival.

Thank you.

Is that ice on the windshield?

He discovers that six minutes before the crash,

the crew of Flight 3407 had noticed a buildup of ice

on the aircraft.

Got it on my side.

Don't have yours?

Oh, yeah.

Oh, it's lots of ice.

Ice can be a deadly threat to any airplane.

If an aircraft has ice on it, it will have more drag on it

so it will require more power to maintain a given airspeed.

Oh man.

Most I've seen on the leading edges in a long time.

Until a year ago, Rebecca Shaw

had no experience with ice on an aircraft.

I'd never seen icing conditions.

I've never deiced.

Never experienced any of that.

When ice creates on a wing,

it adds weight to the airplane,

but most importantly, it changes the shape of the wing,

and of course, it's the shape, the curved shape

of the wing that actually creates the lift.

So by changing the lift characteristics of the airplane

it makes it less able to fly.

You know, I would have freaked out.

If I'd have seen this much ice and thought

oh my gosh, we were gonna crash.

Observing that there was ice on the airplane

was an important thing to do, but then it would be

important to turn around and verify

that your ant-icing, deicing equipment was on,

and there was no indication on the voice recorder

that they actually re-checked.

The CVR reveals that only minutes

after the crew detected ice,

a device called the stick shaker went off.

It was a warning that the plane was about to stall,

literally to fall out of the sky.

Shortly afterwards, the aircraft did precisely that.

We know there were icing conditions.

The only question was, were they bad enough

to induce this airplane to have a failure?

Ice is now the chief suspect

in the crash of Flight 3407.

If it's ice, let's prove it.

We were all convinced that we had an icing accident.

We said yeah, it's gonna be an icing accident.

We just gotta make sure we look

for these few key aspects of icing, verify that,

and we're good.

But some of the victims' family members

are less convinced.

My initial thought was that it was ice-related incident.

It was a icy night that brought the plane down.

And as we began to talk to people who knew airline travel

who were pilots themselves, they would look

kind of askant and say I don't think so.

That doesn't make sense.

Some investigators share that suspicion.

Scott Warren knows a plane like the Q400

has a sophisticated deicing system.

It's designed to keep ice from building up

on the wings and other critical parts of the aircraft.

To prevent ice accumulating, the plane has rubber bladders

along the front of the wings called deicing boots.

A series of valves uses air from the engines

to inflate the boots, and crack the ice off the wing.

Those boots are designed to inflate periodically

and that inflation breaks off the ice

that's accumulated on those leading edges.

Warren now wonders if the crew of Flight 3407

actually turned on their deicing equipment.

He studies data from the plane's other black box,

its flight data recorder, or FDR.

It tracks the workings of crucial aircraft systems,

including the deicing mechanism.

We know from the FDR data that the deicing system

had been selected on by the crew,

and it was on during the majority of the flight,

and certainly at the end of the flight,

it was recorded in the on position.

But now Warren needs to figure out

if the device was actually working.

Just because the data records that the system is on,

that's a start, but you can't necessarily

believe that one piece of information.

The only way to know

is to find what remains of the plane's deicing system

and determine if it was active when the aircraft went down.

Clint Crookshanks' team hunts for a crucial component

of the system, the valves.

Excuse me.

Okay.

For the deice valves, we said here's what it looks like.

Look for something like this.

If we can find those valves, then we can test them

and see if they're operating correctly.

The valves were very important to us,

because they are the key component that moves air

from the engines where the bleed air originates

for the deicing system.

Okay, good.

Five more to go.

Five of the plane's six deicing valves

are eventually recovered.

Some were badly burned,

some were in fairly good shape.

And we took those valves, and we conducted

as much testing on those valves

as we thought was appropriate for the level of damage.

We looked at the level of electrical conductivity,

and we looked at the pressure testing.

We looked at a wide variety of things

depending on the condition of the valve itself.

And as far as we could tell, all those valves

were working properly.

Is that ice on the windshield?

Got it on my side.

Now investigators have to consider

the possibility-- - Oh yeah.

Oh, it's lots of ice.

That there was so much ice on the wings

that the deicing system couldn't get rid of it fast enough.

Oh yeah.

That's the most I've seen on the leading edges

in a long time.

It has happened before.

In Roselawn, Indiana, a French-built commuter plane

crashed in 1994 after suffering a catastrophic buildup

of ice on the wing.

By analyzing how much power was needed

for the plane to maintain its airspeed,

investigators reach a surprising conclusion.

Basically, the aircraft was flying as if it had

a relatively small amount of ice on it,

but a very manageable amount of ice.

Looks normal.

It was not overloaded, it was not excessive.

If ice didn't bring down the plane,

something else must have caused it to stall.

Warren studies the Q400's operating manual

to learn the plane's stall speed,

the velocity at which it can no longer generate

enough lift to stay in the air.

He discovers that in the conditions Flight 3407

was flying through, it's roughly 111 knots.

He now compares the plane's stall speed

with its actual airspeed just before

the stall warning went off.

131 knots, well above the danger zone.

Flaps 15.

When the stick shaker went off--

- Uh-- - Jesus Christ!

They were not necessarily at the edge of a stall.

They were still 20 knots or so away from the stall.

This new revelation deepens the mystery

of Flight 3407.

If it wasn't stalling, why did it fall out of the sky?

Investigators turn their attention to the critical seconds

before Flight 3407 went out of control.

They look for clues that could explain

why the stall warning went off

when the aircraft was flying well within its safety margins.

They discover that this plane has a unique feature

known as a reference speed switch.

It governs the sensitivity of the plane's stall warning.

Very few airplanes in my experience

have such a switch.

This airplane is the only one I know of

that has an actual switch on the overhead panel.

It was designed by the manufacturer

to be an extra safety feature.

So he had a variable ref speed?

Pilots are supposed to turn on

the reference speed switch when they're going to be

flying through icing conditions.

And we'll probably be picking up some ice.

When in the increase position,

it reminds pilots to fly faster

to counteract any drag effect ice will have

on the aircraft.

When you are in icing conditions,

and ice does accrue on the wing,

it can cause the stall speed to go up,

and so this ref speed switch correspondingly

causes the warning to come on sooner,

or at a higher speed.

What that switch does is it basically

changes the trigger settings for the stick shaker.

So we had to ask the manufacturer,

how does this switch work?

What we found was it was part of a systems description

that the crews got when they went through training,

but they didn't get a lot of training

on how to handle that switch.

It seemed like it was too simple to worry about.

Investigators need to know

if the crew of Flight 3407 had turned on

the reference speed switch,

triggering the stick shaker at a faster than normal speed.

The flight data recorder doesn't show

whether the switch was on.

Investigators must find another way of determining

its position at the time of the accident.

Clint here.

Clint Crookshanks is given a new priority.

All right, I'll see if we have it.

Recover the ice protection panel

from the Q400's cockpit,

where the reference speed switch is housed.

Since the panel was in the cockpit,

finding it is a challenge.

Most of the front end of the airplane

was consumed by fire, and so we didn't find anything

except for little balls of molten aluminum,

little wire bundles, and a lot of ash.

But after an extensive search,

Crookshanks discovers that the ice protection panel

is one of the few pieces of the cockpit that survived.

Bingo.

However, the knobs and switches

are barely recognizable.

Crookshanks examines the charred panel

to check the position of the reference speed switch.

It was set to activate stall warnings

at higher than normal speeds.

We did find the ref speed switch in the wreckage,

and it was in the increase position.

This discovery only raises more questions.

We'll probably be picking up some ice.

The cockpit voice recorder indicates

that as Renslow was beginning his descent into Buffalo,

he commanded his plane to fly at the normal approach speed.

Left gear down.

But what's strange

is that with his reference speed switch on,

he actually should have been flying faster.

Bless you.

As this is what the switch

would remind him to do.

So why wasn't he?

The plane's computer warned the crew to fly faster,

according to the settings they had configured,

by displaying a set of red bars on the airspeed indicator.

But you may have a better quality of life

in regards to--

These bars are meant to warn the pilots

that a stick shaker activation is imminent.

If you're looking at the airspeed indicator,

you should be aware that you're getting slow,

and the stall warning may come on.

Jesus Christ!

It seems Renslow and Shaw

were caught off guard.

Still, they could have easily corrected the situation.

Once the stick shaker have activated, they could have

turned the switch off,

or they could have put the nose down

and increased their airspeed.

It's clear to investigators

that Flight 3407 wasn't in danger of stalling

when the stick shaker went off.

So now they need to know exactly what happened

after the stall warning was activated.

An animated simulation of the crash is constructed

based on information from the flight recorders.

Watch what happens just after the stick shaker goes off.

It illustrates that just after the stick shaker

was triggered, the plane suddenly pulled up.

This action dramatically slowed the aircraft,

and at this point, it did stall.

Essentially, the airplane entered an aerodynamic stall

from which it did not recover.

It pitched over, and hit the ground.

Investigators are dumbfounded.

Flight 3407 wasn't stalling when the stick shaker went off,

but a few seconds later, it was.

The crew's every action during that brief time

now demands careful scrutiny.

What did they do?

It's a puzzle.

How could a trained flight crew take a plane

that wasn't stalling, and in the space of a few moments

make it fall from the sky?

Any time you have an apparent stall

for no apparent reason, that's a mystery.

We would expect that no flight crew would stall an airliner.

So the question is why.

The focus of the investigation now switches

from the plane to the crew,

specifically on the moves they made

during the critical seconds after the stall warning sounded.

We wanted to see if the way they flew the airplane

was the way they were trained

according to the standard operating procedures

that are portrayed in our flight manuals.

The flight data recorder retains information

from more than 1000 different aspects

of the Q400's flight operations.

From the airspeed and altitude,

to the position of the rudder pedals and throttles.

It also records the movements

of the most critical flight control,

the control column.

Pilots use the control column to change the position

of the elevators and ailerons,

which manage the direction of the plane.

The flight data recorder stores information

not just about the control column's position,

but how much force is applied to it as well.

The FDR records what the control positions were.

It has sensors built into the control column,

it has sensors built into the control wheel.

What Scott Warren finds

when analyzing the control column's position is stunning.

In response to the stick shaker, Captain Renslow

should have pushed the column forward

to bring the nose down and gain speed.

But for some reason, he did the exact opposite.

We found that the crew, instead of pushing forward,

which is the normal response to a stick shaker triggering,

the crew was actually pulling back on the control.

This had the effect of pulling the nose up,

causing the airspeed to drop, and tipping the aircraft

into an actual stall.

Captain Renslow had apparently mishandled

one of the most elemental piloting maneuvers,

how to recover from a stall.

Above everything, it requires gaining airspeed

to get out of the red.

The recovery procedure

is fairly simple and straightforward.

It requires pushing forward on the controls,

and adding full power.

At any point in time, had the captain pushed forward

on those flight controls, he had a reasonably good chance

at recovering quickly.

From everything we've gained,

that stall was recoverable on a repeated number of levels,

and a repeated basis.

There was no reason for that plane to go down.

Investigators also learn

that first officer Shaw, in trying to help Renslow

deal with the crisis, inadvertently made things worse.

I put the flaps up!

She retracted the flaps, reducing the amount

of lift as the plane struggled to stay in the air.

Had the first officer simply called out you're stalled,

advanced the power, pushed the nose over,

the airplane would have been able to recover.

From a human point of view, it's sad to recognize

that those sorts of things happened,

and the tragedy that came from that.

It's concluded that Captain Renslow's failure

to properly respond to the stall warning

was the primary cause of the crash of Flight 3407.

As the issue is now pilot error,

rather than mechanical failure,

human performance investigator

Evan Byrne is brought onboard.

His first question, why hadn't either Renslow or Shaw

noticed that their airspeed was too low

for the icing conditions?

In this case, we can look back towards the fact

that there were clear and conspicuous cues

of the deteriorating airspeed that were not heeded

by the captain.

Byrne listens to the cockpit voice recording

to try to understand what might have led to that oversight.

Where you could be home with your husband,

to take care of, and all that stuff.

He learns that the crew had been talking

throughout the flight.

The conversation continued during the landing approach.

It's a violation of a rule known as the sterile cockpit,

which bans nonessential conversation

during critical phases of the flight.

Yeah, you're gonna be upgraded in six months.

Blah, blah, blah.

Quite simply, it prohibits conversations

that aren't related to the operation of the flight.

Let's do a descent checklist, please.

We can do the approach checklist along with it.

Yeah, sure.

Bug set.

Byrne also discovers

that because of the cockpit banter,

the crew performed critical checklists and briefings late.

The hydraulic pressure and quantity--

Distracted, the crew probably didn't see

the red bar indicating they were flying too slowly

for the conditions the plane had been configured for.

Approach checklist complete.

Rock and roll.

When crews deviate from standard operating procedures,

and perform checklists late, or don't make

the required call outs, they become more vulnerable

to subtle mistakes that they may make inadvertently

that could lead to startle and surprise,

or unanticipated events that they have to respond to.

The evidence is unequivocal.

The crew of Flight 3407 was badly distracted

throughout the approach.

Even when we interviewed, and he said yeah,

you're gonna be upgraded in six months.

They had forgotten the key setting

they had made that required them to fly faster than normal.

They had missed indications that they were flying

too slow for icing conditions.

Then, Captain Renslow had reacted incorrectly

to a stall warning, sealing the fate of the plane.

Evan Byrne wonders what could have caused

a trained airline flight crew

to have made such missteps?

He finds a clue on the cockpit voice recording.

Excuse me.

The crew was showing signs of fatigue.

Could Renslow and Shaw have been too tired

to function effectively on the flight deck?

It's a tough question.

Answering it will require tracking their movements

during the 72 hours leading up to the crash.

It's basic gumshoe detective work

in the investigation where we're trying to collect

as many facts as we can.

Byrne interviews the families of the pilots.

Can I speak to Mrs. Renslow, please?

He studies the pilots' mobile phone bills,

and records of text messages.

He searches the airline's computer system

to determine if and when the crew used it

to check their schedules.

He needs to track their every move.

And what time did Rebecca leave the house?

We're talking to colleagues or other pilots,

check airmen, instructors, and we ask all those people

about the pilots, about their recent activities.

He learns that neither pilot

actually lived anywhere near Newark,

but could not afford to stay in hotels

on their salaries.

Captain Renslow was earning $60,000 annually

at Colgan Air.

First officer Shaw was being paid less than $16,000 a year,

substantially less than an average bus driver.

As a result, both pilots had made

long cross-country commutes to Newark,

Captain Renslow from his home in Florida,

and Rebecca Shaw from Seattle, Washington.

In fact, Shaw had commuted all night from Seattle

on a cargo flight that connected through Memphis.

Captain Renslow had spent the night

in the airline's crew lounge at Newark airport

after having already worked two days.

He was seen sleeping on a couch in the lounge.

It was against company rules, but pilots who couldn't

afford housing near the airport did it anyway.

Records show that at 3:10 a.m. on the morning of the crash,

Renslow was awake.

He checked his work schedule

on the airline's computer network.

Next stop, Buffalo.

At 7:29 a.m., Rebecca Shaw sent a text message

to her husband telling him she'd arrived safely in Newark.

Hi honey, it's me.

Phone records indicate

that later in the morning, Captain Renslow

was on the phone several times.

Rebecca Shaw was noticed having a nap

catching up on the rest she'd lost flying in

the night before.

That's not a lot of sleep.

We ultimately concluded that it was likely

that both crew members were experiencing some effects

of fatigue at the time of the accident.

Her job is to watch the airspeed.

Her job was to watch the instrument panel,

and in my view, if she was fatigued to the point

where it's like right here, and you're so dull,

I think that's where she was,

and he just was not capable.

He was just, he shouldn't have been flying an airplane.

The revelation leads John Kausner

to become a fierce advocate for changes to the industry.

He raises awareness among both lawmakers and the public

about the need to improve regulations

governing pilots at regional airlines.

This is just saying we support 3407 families

that are fighting for aviation safety,

and these representatives of congressmen and senators

have done that for us, and we're very appreciative.

He takes his fight all the way

to Washington, DC.

We needed to do something, and so we began to advocate

in Washington weekly, every other week,

and we've innumerable trips down there.

And immediately, the families just gelled.

We all attended the hearings

and began to say this is what we can do.

The crash of Flight 3407

focused the world's attention on a growing safety problem.

The relatives of those who were killed

will help eliminate that threat.

The crash of Flight 3407 exposed wide-ranging shortcomings

into regulations that govern regional airlines.

These smaller airlines now make up half

of all daily passenger flights in the US.

Their pilots are generally younger, less experienced,

earn less, and work long hours.

Their levels of safety are way different

from the majors.

They have a much lower threshold, in training, in ability.

In pay, obviously, so they can't attract

a higher qualified pilot.

There are pretty low wages,

pretty difficult working conditions.

We don't seem to attract the same level

of applicant that we used to.

Some regional airlines get into a bind,

and they have to hire the first people

that meet the minimums.

In the US, of the seven fatal accidents

involving passenger jets over the past 10 years,

five have involved regional airlines.

Those include the crash of Delta Connection Flight 5191

in August 2006, which killed 49 people

when the crew took off from the wrong runway.

John Kausner's campaign to change laws governing pilots

has paid off.

We relied on your support, we needed your support,

you nurtured us.

We wanna thank all of you, from all of us.

A year and a half after the crash,

under pressure from Kausner

and other victims' family members,

the US Senate passed a bill

which toughens training requirements,

and forces the FAA to draw up new rules

on pilot fatigue.

Studies into the problem of over-tired pilots

are already underway.

At the University of Iowa, researchers are developing

a system that could help pilots resist fatigue,

stay engaged with the critical task of flying,

and prevent future tragedies like that of Flight 3407.

Thomas Schnell is a human factors engineer.

We use a number of neurocognitive and physiological

sensors that we apply on subjects, pilots that we invite

for our studies.

Well, just go ahead.

He's studying how pilots stay alert

on the flight deck as a test subject conducts

a cross-country journey in a simulator.

Using sensors, he can determine how alert and engaged

a pilot really is.

The research could lead to the development

of fatigue detectors on airplanes.

We are trying to predict pilot state

so that we can adjust something on the flight deck

to prevent the problem from getting worse,

or starting in the first place.

We monitor brain activity, eye movement activity,

heart, the EKG and respiration, and other parameters,

in an effort to figure out what the pilots

or the crew's state is.

Are they fatigued, overworked,

are they disengaged or distracted?

This section is where they were really drowsy,

and you can see that the gaze has become kind of bored.

Schnell instructs the flight simulator

to trigger a major systems failure in the cockpit.

It's no good.

Everything's dead.

Hydraulics systems have failed.

Try and call that heat map so we can see

what this brain activity was.

Brace for effect.

When a crew is fatigued, what you might see

is that their reaction to events might slow down,

so you'll see mistakes being made on the flight deck.

It's precisely these kinds of mistakes

on the part of Renslow and Shaw

that ultimately crashed Flight 3407.

And killed 50 people.

It's a tragedy that should not have happened.

It was foreseeable, was preventable,

and it's repeatable if we don't do something about it.

And I'm focused and determined to change what exists

and not have another dad sitting here.