Just back from seeing the movie, "Sully", with Tom Hanks as the heroic pilot

[The Velveteen Ocelot]

37. That accident was caused by plain old pilot error.

I actually knew one of the lawyers who worked on the litigation that arose from it, and I had previously met the co-pilot, who (briefly) worked for the same airline I did. He was fired after a few months because he couldn't learn the systems of the airplane he was assigned to. And the captain was, in fact, a weak pilot (with a criminal record and a doctored logbook) who was known to turn over the actual flying to his co-pilot. Wellstone, who didn't like flying, was comfortable with the captain because of his pleasant and reassuring demeanor, but Wellstone didn't know crap about aviation and had no reason to know the guy really wasn't such a great pilot. The charter outfit he worked for had done a poor job vetting and training their people, and the FAA got on them about that after the accident. Charter operators have much lower standards than scheduled airlines, although that has improved recently.

The weather wasn't terrible but there was a cloud layer and the visibility was not great. They were conducting a non-precision approach which, by definition, is only accurate enough to get you close enough to the airport to find it. The ATC track showed that they didn't intercept the VOR radial correctly and overshot the final approach course, then allowed the airplane to get too slow while they were trying to find the runway - and the airplane stalled and crashed. There was nothing mysterious about it. Much as I loathe Cheney and Bush, if they'd wanted to get rid of Wellstone they could have done so in a way that didn't breed stupid conspiracy theories.

The NTSB report is here: http://www.ntsb.gov/investigations/AccidentReports/Reports/AAR0303.pdf