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Photo: NTSB

I almost never speculate on the cause of a crash early on, but in the case of the crash of Colgan Flight 3407, I weighed in earlier than I ever had before. Within a couple of days, when icing was still seen as a likely cause, it seemed to me that the cause was far simpler, the crew's failure to control the airplane. That is, in fact, what the NTSB, a year later, determined to be the probable cause of the crash.

Here's the text

"The National Transportation Safety Board determines that the probable cause of this accident was the captain’s inappropriate response to the activation of the stick shaker, which led to an aerodynamic stall from which the airplane did not recover. Contributing to the accident were (1) the flight crew’s failure to monitor airspeed in relation to the rising position of the lowspeed cue, (2) the flight crew’s failure to adhere to sterile cockpit procedures, (3) the captain’s failure to effectively manage the flight, and (4) Colgan Air’s inadequate procedures for airspeed selection and management during approaches in icing conditions."

That seems pretty clear cut, but today there are a number of people who believe that the pilot's pulling back on the stick when the stall came was a result of his reaction to what he perceived as a tailplane icing situation, in which case the usual recovery from stall of lower the nose is the wrong thing to do. Some even say that the captain's actions were exactly the right thing to do but that the icing was too severe for his recovery attempt to succeed.

If you were to apply the Occam's Razor test to this theory, you would discard it almost immediately. According to Occam's Razor, the simplest, most likely explanation, the one that introduces the fewest new assumptions, is usually correct. I'd go further and say that it is almost always correct. That doesn't mean the simplest explanation isn't sometimes a complicated one. In the case of the assassination of President Kennedy, for example, the most likely explanation--what with Oswald's double agent background, the subsequent hit job on him and the high likelihood that shots were fired by someone in addition to Oswald--is that it was some kind of elaborate conspiracy. (Please note that comments focusing on the facts of this case and not the Colgan crash will be deleted.) Other explanations, such as Oswald acting alone, although involving far less complication, are just too far fetched to be believable.

In the case of the Colgan crash, you need to look at the pilot, who had a history of suboptimal performance on his reviews and checkrides throughout his career. Did he suddenly, after having conducted an undisciplined flight up until that point and letting the airspeed deteriorate dangerously, when the chips were down, turn into, as Richard Collins put it, the "ace of the base?" Was he able in that last instant to formulate an out-of-the-box, totally non-standard answer to a loss-of-control scenario based on some theoretical discussion of Dash 8 tailplane icing behavior he'd heard in training years previous?

I don't think so. It's not the simplest answer, nor is it the one that views events as the participants would likely have viewed them.

What happened, Occam says, is that the captain did what countless pilots have done when shocked at the ground suddenly rushing up at them. He pulled back, trying in vain to get the airplane to go in the other direction.

I believe that it was, sadly, just that simple.