
The captain’s response to the stall warning, the investigators reported, “should have been automatic, but his improper flight control inputs were inconsistent with his training” and instead revealed “startle and confusion.” An executive from the company that operated the flight, the regional carrier Colgan Air, admitted that the pilots seemed to lack “situational awareness” as the emergency unfolded. A National Transportation Safety Board investigation concluded that the cause of the accident was pilot error. The crash, which killed all 49 people on board as well as one person on the ground, should never have happened. “We’re down,” the captain said, just before the Q400 slammed into a house in a Buffalo suburb. The plane spun out of control, then plummeted. Rather than preventing a stall, Renslow’s action caused one. He reacted quickly, but he did precisely the wrong thing: he jerked back on the yoke, lifting the plane’s nose and reducing its airspeed, instead of pushing the yoke forward to gain velocity. The autopilot disconnected, and the captain took over the controls. The Q400 was well into its approach to the Buffalo airport, its landing gear down, its wing flaps out, when the pilot’s control yoke began to shudder noisily, a signal that the plane was losing lift and risked going into an aerodynamic stall. He and his co-pilot, Rebecca Shaw, chatted-about their families, their careers, the personalities of air-traffic controllers-as the plane cruised uneventfully along its northwesterly route at 16,000 feet.

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The captain, Marvin Renslow, manned the controls briefly during takeoff, guiding the Bombardier Q400 turboprop into the air, then switched on the autopilot and let the software do the flying. As is typical of commercial flights today, the pilots didn’t have all that much to do during the hour-long trip.

On the evening of February 12, 2009, a Continental Connection commuter flight made its way through blustery weather between Newark, New Jersey, and Buffalo, New York.
