It wasn't much of a secret to investigators that the captain, 47-year-old Marvin Renslow, was not a pilot in command of his game from the moment the cockpit voice recorder was played and his motor-mouth monologue could be heard.
They were the family of Charles F. Burlingame III, known as Chic, the pilot in command of Flight 77, which was hijacked and crashed into the Pentagon on Sept. 11.
"As far as the eye can see there will always be a pilot in command of an aircraft," says Lambert Dopping-Hepenstal, the director of ASTRAEA.
It was while he was alone in command of the Airbus A320, that the co-pilot manipulated the button, what we call the flight monitoring system, to activate the descent of the plane.
Špegelj remained in command of the ZNG.
But Air Force pilots in command of UAVs have countered this assumption several times.
The pilot in command, Richard de Crespigny, spent the last two years researching the airplane and its engines for a book, according to Richard Woodward, a safety representative for the international pilots union and a Qantas pilot who says he has spoken to the crew of Flight 32.
An instrument rating requires 50 hours of cross country Pilot-in-Command (PIC) and 40 hours of actual or simulated instrument conditions.
Although not the pilot in command, according to the cockpit voice recorder transcript, the first officer was the pilot flying at the time of the accident.
Inside, the pilot in command, Rob Martin of XOJet, a private jet company based in San Francisco, went over the essentials: the iPod dock; the touch screen to control the lights and movies; the leather swivel seats that I was told (while treating mine like a Tilt-a-Whirl) cost $30,000 to replace; the satellite phone; the Nespresso machine; the cabinet with the Oreo cookies and Kistler chardonnay.
