The NTSB has come out with some findings on the airline crash in Buffalo and it looks like the flight crew could not have done things more wrong. Sterile cockpit violations, lack of systems knowledge, a cavalier attitude toward flight operations and a staggeringly inadequate flight experience background killed those passengers and the poor guy on the ground.

Apparently, the captain had flunked multiple check rides during his career including a recent simulator ride. He had a checkered past, very little flight total flight time and almost no flight time in type. The copilot was from a hot climate and had never seen airframe ice before. No experience, no flight wisdom and no common sense combined with a very long day in absolutely terrible weather in a weak airplane is a deadly mixture and one that could have been avoided.

But, then again, everybody wanted cheap tickets and the airline system gave those passengers exactly what they paid for – minimum training, minimum maintenance and minimum attention to safety.

The existence of pilot stupidity is not a new phenomenon. Pilots have been doing idiotic things since flight began in the last century and a lot of NTSB accident reports record the gaffes that can kill hapless passengers.

In cases like this, I have always thought that the pilots getting killed isn’t such a bad thing – it is merely God weeding out the dumb pilots from the gene pool to ensure that eventually no stupid pilots will be bred.

The sad part happens when the aviation god’s plan of future pilot purity kills innocent victims like passengers and people sitting in their homes; aka: the crash scene watching the newest show on Fox.

What can we do during this time when God is sorting out and eliminating all the stupid pilots from our herd? Not much, I’m afraid. It may be hundreds of years before natural selection ensures that only smart professional pilots are allowed to fly our beat-up turbo-prop airliners into blizzards in Buffalo.

For every Captain Sully, rest assured that there is at least one pilot as stupid as the guy who thought that stall recovery required yanking the nose up. For every Neil Armstrong out there flying there is a person operating and airplane that has absolutely no idea of what they are doing or how their aircraft works.

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