This is not a new story (it’s from 2004) and many aviation fans have probably already seen it, but I happened to come across it a second time earlier and it struck me as such a powerful object lesson. Two young pilots – and I emphasize “young” – who were nevertheless supposed to be professional airline pilots managed to crash a CRJ-200 and kill themselves through sheer unbridled stupidity. I guess it shows that youth will triumph over wisdom a lot of times.
They thought they could just have some fun because it was a repositioning flight with no passengers, and treat the jet like a fun sports car. They were supposed to fly it from Little Rock to Minneapolis. First they put it through outrageous rates of climb, just for fun. Then they took it to its absolute maximum ceiling of 41,000 ft. Where it stalled, and dropped like a rock. During the course of trying to recover from the stall, they managed to flame out both engines. They failed to restart them, both because they never achieved the necessary speed for a windmill start, and also because both engines had core-locked and were not restartable with APU power, either. Those versions of the General Electric CF34 were subject to core lock if they suddenly shut down at high temperatures, and would stay that way until they cooled. And finally, they didn’t act on four separate emergency diversion opportunities until it was too late to reach any of them.
Unbelievable irresponsibility in a pair that was supposed to have been trained as professional airline pilots.
