Groundhog Day at the NTSB
Recent non-fatal accidents involving US carriers are causing the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) to question if larger issues exist in the flight deck environment that require more scrutiny.
Board chairman Deborah Hersman during a speech today at the Regional Airline Association convention in Milwaukee, Wisconsin said while the Colgan Air flight 3407 crash of a Bombardier Q400 in February 2009 garnered significant attention, NTSB is seeing other incidents that are triggering questions about sterile cockpit rules being routinely violated.
Hersman says she stands by a comment she made during the Colgan hearing that it felt like the movie "Groundhog Day".
"What I meant was that the issues we discovered in our investigation were nothing new. We've long known about them, and in fact NSTB has long-standing recommendations on many of them," she explains.
