Air Charter Executives Face Criminal Charges In 2005 Crash

Air Charter Executives Face Criminal Charges In 2005 Crash - Six executives who ran Platinum Jet Management, based in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., are facing federal criminal charges in connection with the crash of a Bombardier Challenger CL-600 . . .According to the indictment, the Star Ledger says, Platinum instructed its pilots to falsify weight-and-balance graphs, and flew more than 25 commercial charter flights with weights that exceeded aircraft center of gravity limits.

Sometimes it seems that you never get the whole story, but from what we have here it looks like these executives did some bad things.

However, I can put my finger on the FAR that says charter executives are responsible for the safe flight of an aircraft. It fact, I remember explicitly hearing somewhere about it being the pilot's job.

So the questions is, why did those pilots accept the instruction to falsify weight-and-balance graphs? Is this something that happened after the fact, or did they take off knowing they were out of limits?

When it comes right down to it, I trust engineers more than most any profession. Just last week I went on a riff to my wife about how much more useful an engineer is than a politician. Engineers are meticulous people, grounded in facts and numbers. When an engineer, nay a group of engineers , is on record saying that a plane won't fly out of certain limits, I'm more than a little inclined to listen. Why would anyone risk their lives, and the lives of others to test something that has already been proven?

Regardless of what those executives did, it was the pilots who should have known better and refused to go along. The people in the back deserve at least that.