Endeavor Flight 4819: Information about Endeavor Air 4819 flight crew

Thursday, Feb. 20, 6:30 p.m. EST

Endeavor Air and Delta are correcting disinformation in social media containing false and misleading assertions about the flight crew of Endeavor Air 4819.  

- Captain: Mesaba Airlines, a progenitor company of Endeavor Air, hired the captain in October 2007. He has served both as an active duty Captain and in pilot training and flight safety capacities. Assertions that he failed training events are false. Assertions that he failed to flow into a pilot position at Delta Air Lines due to training failures are also false.

- First Officer: Hired in January 2024 by Endeavor Air and completed training in April. She has been flying for Endeavor since that time. Her flight experience exceeded the minimum requirements set by U.S. Federal regulations. Assertions that she failed training events are false.

Both crew members are qualified and FAA certified for their positions. 

https://news.delta.com

I'm not surprised that the airlines will say anything to cover their behinds.  We'll have to wait for the NTSB final report to know what actually happened, but it sure looks like a poor landing to me.

It has long been known that the big airlines contract out many of their shorter flights to small, cheaper regional airlines which don't pay their pilots well and don't have the same standards as the majors, all to increase their own profit.

I wouldn't trust the FAA to regulate a RC plane event, let alone actual airlines.  There is so much conflict of interest and revolving door practices at that agency that it's hard to trust it.  Hopefully this will change.

Dave

1 hour ago, dave2013 said:

I'm not surprised that the airlines will say anything to cover their behinds

So what do the pilots training records actually say?

Edited February 22, 20251 yr by SAS443

Watch this for details.

16 hours ago, The Flight Level said:

Endeavor Flight 4819: Information about Endeavor Air 4819 flight crew

Thursday, Feb. 20, 6:30 p.m. EST

Endeavor Air and Delta are correcting disinformation in social media containing false and misleading assertions about the flight crew of Endeavor Air 4819.  

- Captain: Mesaba Airlines, a progenitor company of Endeavor Air, hired the captain in October 2007. He has served both as an active duty Captain and in pilot training and flight safety capacities. Assertions that he failed training events are false. Assertions that he failed to flow into a pilot position at Delta Air Lines due to training failures are also false.

- First Officer: Hired in January 2024 by Endeavor Air and completed training in April. She has been flying for Endeavor since that time. Her flight experience exceeded the minimum requirements set by U.S. Federal regulations. Assertions that she failed training events are false.

Both crew members are qualified and FAA certified for their positions. 

https://news.delta.com

I sense some deceptive weasel-wording from Delta's PR department.

I have a lot of questions about a pilot that stays put at a regional carrier for 18 years.  Assertions that he failed to flow up to Delta due to training failures may be false, but the fact still remains that he failed to flow up to Delta.  That's unusual, and I strongly suspect there's a lot more to the story here.

Endeavor Air has conspicuously paraded their obsessive devotion to prioritizing DEI for years (e.g. advertising "unmanned" all-female crews), and by doing so they have opened themselves up to legitimate intense scrutiny regarding the qualifications of their new hires relative to the pool of candidates.  Their lack of transparency in the days following the crash sure makes me suspect that they're trying to hide something.

Thanks, Bob.

 

3 hours ago, Bob Scott said:

Endeavor Air has conspicuously paraded their obsessive devotion to prioritizing DEI for years (e.g. advertising "unmanned" all-female crews), and by doing so they have opened themselves up to legitimate intense scrutiny regarding the qualifications of their new hires relative to the pool of candidates.

I think this is going to be a major problem with DEI. Anything that possibly can be blamed on DEI likely will be. This kind of thing won't do anyone any favors.

There are some who would consider hiring based on merit to be anathema, but we really need to get back to that standard.

Hook

4 hours ago, Bob Scott said:

I have a lot of questions about a pilot that stays put at a regional carrier for 18 years.

I can think of any number of possible reasons. My favorite is that he may have been one of the founders of the original airline. Or, he may be getting some benefits that he'd lose at Delta. He's likely a senior pilot and can select all his own flights, which he'd lose at Delta. Or he may just prefer the corporate atmosphere at the regional airline. I probably would too.

If you'd been working at Buffalo Airlines for that  length of time, and Buffalo had been "acquired" somehow by a large airline that you weren't particularly fond of, would you move up or stay with Buffalo? 

 

4 hours ago, Bob Scott said:

I sense some deceptive weasel-wording from Delta's PR department.

What bothers me the most is their general tone and the word "disinformation" which implies intentional misleading. There is a certain kind of person who uses the words "misinformation", "disinformation" and  "malinformation" and any time I encounter those words I assume whatever they're being applied to is likely the actual truth.

There is another kind of person who would use the words, "that's incorrect" or "that's mistaken" and I tend to trust these kind of people more. Don't tell the first kind of people.

What's the difference between a "conspiracy theory" and a "proven fact"? These days it's generally only a few weeks. 🙂 

Hook

Edited February 22, 20251 yr by LHookins

1 hour ago, LHookins said:

I think this is going to be a major problem with DEI.

Hiring based on anything other than education, qualifications, experience, and competence is not only dumb, it is dangerous.

At best, what DEI does is make the pool of qualified candidates for a job smaller, thereby limiting available choices and inadvertently eliminating other people from consideration who are more qualified, experienced, or competent.

At worst, and this is very likely what's *actually* been going on, it lowers standards for certain people allowing them to qualify, and then favors them in the hiring process, thereby putting people into positions for which there are other more qualified and competent people who were excluded.  For jobs like pilots, doctors, air traffic controllers, police officers, and military personnel, for example, this is extremely dangerous and stupid.

Dave

While remaining with a regional carrier for 18 or more years is likely out of the ordinary, there are personal or family or location or comfort zone issues that dictate whether one decides to make a move up the ranks. This also applies to additional careers beyond aviation. We do not know the situation here. 

14 hours ago, The Flight Level said:

While remaining with a regional carrier for 18 or more years is likely out of the ordinary

Heh! Do you remember when they'd award actual gold watches at 20 years of service? 😄

Hook

2 hours ago, LHookins said:

Heh! Do you remember when they'd award actual gold watches at 20 years of service? 😄

Hook

Yes, and even at 30 and 35 years with an actual celebration and speeches!

On 2/23/2025 at 9:15 AM, LHookins said:

Heh! Do you remember when they'd award actual gold watches at 20 years of service? 😄

I'm so old that when I retired, I was presented with a sundial...

42 minutes ago, n4gix said:

I'm so old that when I retired, I was presented with a sundial...

… with genuine Roman numerals.

1 hour ago, n4gix said:

I'm so old that when I retired, I was presented with a sundial...

By Cicero himself I bet!

On 2/22/2025 at 6:40 PM, dave2013 said:

Hiring based on anything other than education, qualifications, experience, and competence is not only dumb, it is dangerous. At best, what DEI does is make the pool of qualified candidates for a job smaller, thereby limiting available choices and inadvertently eliminating other people from consideration who are more qualified, experienced, or competent.

Dave, have you or others here actually been a hiring manager in a DEI situation? Because I have.

Two ground rules that are worth mentioning. First, no sane hiring manager would ever hire someone incompetent. You live and die by the quality of your people and you absolutely need good to great people at every level. Second, you're almost never going to hire the "best" person in your applicant pool. You need to fill the vacancy in a reasonable period of time because the work needs done, there's a limit to how many folks you can move through your recruiting pipeline, and ultimately candidates in demand aren't going to wait around forever (they're interviewing elsewhere, too). You're almost always going to hire the first person that clearly looks like they can do the job well. There may be a better person 20 people farther down the pipeline. So what? There might not be and then I have no one.

If you want to discuss these two items, we can do it separately and you can tell me about your work as a hiring manager and what you did instead. Your industry might be different, but I doubt it.

In my most recent role I was responsible for staffing up a team from 1 to 45 in around four months. It's software engineering, and I was looking for a variety of roles - Architects, Engineers, Managers and some entry-level folks. As you know it's male-dominated, very much so. I had gotten some flack from execs about the fact that I had never hired a woman in my career, and when I had an engineering manager opening I had the opportunity to change that.

I didn't change any of my criteria. I didn't lower the standards. I just changed the top of the funnel - I ensured that our recruiting department (and one or two of our female employees) reached out in online communities focusing around women in STEM, in addition to what we already did recruiting-wise. The applicants I got from one of them were so good that I said that we'd just focus on people from here unless someone truly exceptional came along. I got not one but two good hires out of it, one of whom was quite exceptional. When you have jobs with hundreds of applicants, just ensuring that the top of the funnel is opened a little more to under-represented groups is all it often takes. And in a collaborative job, having different perspectives makes a huge and positive difference.

I've generally found that the people most critical of DEI have never worked as hiring managers in such an environment, and they're almost always middle-aged white males. To talk about the good old days of pure merit where by sheer coincidence the best people were all white males from a good upbringing? Rubbish. That's the sound of mediocre, underachieving people being threatened.

Cheers