Matt Welch
speaker
460 appearances
11 recordings
2 series
first heard Dec 2024
last heard May 2025
Matt Welch’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
Well, let me rephrase that or clean that up a little bit. They're certainly trained, right? The FAA has standards. You have to meet these minimum standards. Endeavor Air has standards. So clearly those two aviators sitting in front of that regional jet had met the standards, the minimum standards. I think what the nuance is experience. That's probably a clean it up by saying experience.
not to uh you know not not to talk down to any folks in the regional jet uh you know i wasn't born the world's best fighter pilot or actually i was but you're not born you're not born with thousands and thousands of flight hours right you're you're you got to get your hours somewhere so a lot of the folks in the regionals are are doing their time right they're they're building their hours
I don't know too many folks who make flying in the regionals a career. They want to fleet up, so to speak, to the main line, to Delta, United, FedEx, where the big money is. So a lot of these regional jet crews are overworked and definitely underpaid, in my opinion. But they have got to meet the minimum requirements.
I would, Megan. I mean, the fact that all of these, before we jumped on the air, Greg and I were talking about last week, we lost a growler, an E-18 crash. We had an F-35 crash in Eielson Air Force Base weeks ago, and then we've had all these other mishaps. If these were spread out over the fiscal year or the calendar year, they'd be blips on the news media radar for a little bit.
But the fact that- We're kind of squished into a month here. Everybody's freaking out. I get it. But as you know, intuitively, driving to or from the airport is the most dangerous part of this exercise. I'd have no problem getting on an RJ. But trust me, Megan, I peek in the cockpit when I get on every once in a while just to I don't know why I do, but I look.
Well, that's above my pay grade, Megan, and thank God that all these folks lived. Look at this.
Correct. Yeah. Mitsubishi, I think it is, the good on them for the manufacturer that these folks lived in the seats. Thankfully, or I guess I can say thankfully, this MSAP was on landing, so that aircraft wasn't packed full of fuel. This could be a whole different story if this happened on takeoff. You know, they were coming into land full of fuel for whatever reason.
The crash rescue folks, they are they're literally sitting in different alert positions on these airfields. They are waiting for something like this to happen. It's sad to say, but as a crash rescue crewman, I don't ever want to be used, but I'm ready to be used. They were on that that crash almost immediately and they were foaming down the aircraft to to protect against the fire.
But this literally it's got to come up to a higher power, because as I saw you know, this mishap occur. And then I saw the video. I'm like, I'm absolutely stunned that more people didn't get hurt. And real quick to what, and I have to admit something. So in my aviation career, I'm going to age myself. Whenever Greg is on TV, you know, the mishap is going to be figured out.
This guy has got all the experience in the world. I'd see him in press conferences or, you know, air show or air crash type of documentaries. And this guy is the 500 pound head.
But to his point, Megan, the more autopilot you use, the less meat and potato flying skills that pilots have. And if you are taking off and landing, or yeah, Greg can probably speak to this better than I can, the majority of mishaps are going to happen in takeoff and landing. So the dependence or the over-dependence on an autopilot is a little scary.
I mean, we have the capability for an F-18 Hornet to land aboard the boat by itself with me as a passenger, but we used to joke like, Hey, if I'm going to be a flaming ball of wreckage going down the flight deck, I'm going to do it. Not some nerd from Microsoft, right? Some autopilot. So there's got to be a happy balance between autopilot and losing stick and rudder skills, you know?
No, I was just going to say, we also have a saying in aviation, if there's any doubt, there's no doubt. So the pilot not flying in this case, if they saw this massive rate of descent coming, like, man, we're going to slam. When in doubt, go around, right? When in doubt, there's no doubt. Go back up. They could have easily, go try it again.
You have enough gas to go try three, four, five other landings. And if it's too windy, go to a divert field. So when in doubt, do not try and salvage a bad approach because bad things happen.
Megan, you can be on the runway and decide something's not too good. And as long as you have enough flying speed to get airborne again. So absolutely. Even if you're, this would have been the most appropriate time. One of the most appropriate times I've seen in my career when the plane's coming down and you're almost like, you know, I know we're going to hit hard. Don't hit hard.
Full power and get airborne again, man. Yeah. If anything, if they had selected go around or max power at that point, they would have at least cushioned that landing. But to Greg's point, all the black boxes and the ones and zeros that are talking to each other, guys like Greg are going to dig into it. We will know sooner rather than later. This won't be a six-month, two-year investigation.
This one's pretty tight.
So, Megan, I saw a meme today. It's now appropriate to start clapping when an airliner lands nowadays. We've frowned upon that, but now we can go back to clapping when we successfully land.
Yeah, I mean, I think, as you said when you were laying this out, so many of the details are amorphous. We don't actually know what any of this means. He's insisting that we're going to take it over, we'll own it, and folks won't be able to come back, but we're also not going to have our military there I don't know how those two things work together.
This is kind of par for the course with Trump in some respects in that this is his truthful hyperbole strategy being deployed again, just like Greenland, just like Mexico, the Mexico-Canada tariffs very recently, where you say something bold and audacious, you promise some horrible consequence if folks don't comply with what you want.
Showing 301–320 of 460 · page 16 of 23
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