On March 3, a business-class jet built by Canadian aircraft manufacturer Bombardier was flying from New Hampshire to Virginia when things suddenly went very wrong. A series of alarms began going off in the cockpit. The pilots, following a troubleshooting checklist, shut off an automatic trim stabilizer on the plane’s tail. At that point, the Bombardier Challenger 300 twin-engine jet suddenly ascended so sharply that the two pilots and three passengers – a husband and wife and their son- were subjected to four G’s of downward force. The plane then went into a nosedive before surging back upward again. The pilots eventually regained control of the plane, but not before the mother, Dana Hyde of Maryland, was thrown violently around the cabin. The plane was diverted for an emergency landing, but Hyde later died from blunt trauma injuries at a local hospital. An NTSB investigation is ongoing, but clearly, a lot of things went wrong. (NY Post)

A business jet flying over New England violently pitched upward then downward, fatally injuring a passenger, after pilots responding to automated cockpit warnings switched off a system that helps keep the aircraft stable, US transportation investigators reported Friday.

The National Transportation Safety Board didn’t reach any conclusions in its preliminary report on the main cause of the deadly March 3 accident, but it described a series of things that went wrong before and after the plane swooped out of control.

Confronted with several alerts in the cockpit of the Bombardier jet, pilots followed a checklist and turned off a switch that “trims” or adjusts the stabilizer on the plane’s tail, the report said.

In an initial assessment the day after the incident, the NTSB attributed the violent motion of the plane to turbulence. But the pilots denied encountering any turbulence. Now the full series of failures that took place remains under investigation, but it certainly doesn’t look like that plane should have ever been allowed to take off.

Leave aside for the moment the fact that scientists still don’t fully understand how air turbulence works. It wasn’t an unreasonable initial estimate for the NTSB to make. But that wasn’t the cause of Dana Hyde’s death and the investigation is revealing some serious issues. There were red flags surrounding this flight before the jet ever pulled away from the terminal.

The initial takeoff was aborted because someone forgot to remove a plastic cover from one of the exterior tubes that determine the plane’s airspeed. Data logs show that when they did take off, there was a rudder limiter fault alert being displayed and a second alert indicated an autopilot stabilizer trim failure. Those seem like pretty big deals when you consider the specific problem the pilots wound up battling in the air.

Then there is the checklist the pilots were following after more alerts went off in midflight. If that’s the checklist they were given, then you probably can’t fault them for following it. But if the problem being addressed involved a potential stabilizer trim failure, why would the checklist include a step calling for them to shut off the system that automatically adjusts the stabilizer? Further, the FAA issued an advisory about the Bombardier Challenger 300 jets last year specifically citing the horizontal stabilizers exhibiting failures that could cause the nose of the plane to suddenly turn downward when attempting to climb to a higher altitude. They obviously knew this problem existed with this specific model of aircraft.

Finally, there were the pilots themselves. They were both cited as “experienced” pilots with 5,000 and 8,000 hours of flying time respectively. But they had only earned their ratings to fly this specific plane three months earlier. Particularly given the issues the Challenger 300 jets had already been experiencing, shouldn’t at least one of the pilots have had more experience?

This is yet another tragic situation where the Department of Transportation should have been on top of these issues in advance. There is a shortage of experienced pilots at the moment and safety protocols are long overdue for a thorough review. The status quo is clearly not sufficient and now it has cost someone their life. If the House GOP majority has any room left on its plate with all of the current things they are investigating, they really need to look into the DOT under Pete Buttigieg and see if there has been sufficient oversight.