Quote:
Originally Posted by fotze
For people who don't want to watch that for the next hour, is thre a basic summary?
Are there safety concerns on these cheapo airlines?
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Maybe I'm getting old... but I'm missing the sex joke here, I mean the post is by Fotze so obviously there's joke there.
The video is basically:
Regional airlines aren't the national airline, say whaaaaaaa? You mean when you fly on a regional carrier that has a similar but different name from the national carrier isn't the national carrier? On your ticket it says operated by someone else, and that means it's operated by that other company? This is shocking!!!!
The second part is basically: first officers at Colgan make $16,000/yr, the FO's they interview made about $22,000/yr again not a lot. They then talk about the horrors of what this means. Which is fair. However they then go on to say that within a year they'll be promoted to captain so all the financial issues are essentially gone.
The third part is about pilot experience, which is probably an issue. Although with how skewed the journalism is, and focusing on the exceptions rather than what is happening overall I don't feel like I can form a good opinion based on the video.
Safety is hounded through the whole video. Which is fair. However they seem to think that Continental should be responsible for the operations of Colgan. I don't know if I'd go that far. There's a line at the end that said "people thought they were flying on Continental, and were getting Continental safety" which isn't really the case. The tickets say it's not operated by Continental, and if the national carriers need to shoulder check who they contract to, what's the point of contracting? The regional carriers are supposed to be up to FAA standards if they are in violation of that, I don't think the national carrier should be held harmful for it.
Basically the video is interesting, but is full of so much misinformation I didn't take a whole lot from it. If you want to do an expose like that, you should show both sides of the story, and demonstrate the differences in what one side is saying over the other. It was too lopsided, and edited too awkwardly for me. Shock journalism at its finest.
That said I'm not defending Colgan, just attacking Frontline. Frontline could be right, just presented their story wrong.
To top it all off, Colgan has been approved to operation international flights under the banner Air Canada Express:
https://www.otc-cta.gc.ca/eng/ruling/194-a-2012
I'm not sure how I feel about that, however it does lead to a post I've been contemplating for a while. I'll let it sit further and probably start a new thread on the topic.
As for worry about safety, not really in Canada. I'm not a huge fan of SMS (the safety check process used by Transport Canada) however I don't see it being an issue with the major players (more so the carriers servicing up north).