The first scene of the captain of Trans-Colorado Flight 2286 is him taking a large sip from a coffee cup. The first officer has nothing of the sort on his person. Maybe a subtle clue as to the fate of the flight?
NTSB investigator Alan Diehl made the statement that the flight data recorder tells you what happened, and the cockpit voice recorder tells you why it happened. That statement held true with Partnair Flight 394, even though both recorders had some flaws that prevented the usual data from being recorded. The Partnair FDR was a foil-based recorder that didn't record properly because the aircraft was vibrating excessively; those vibrations caused the aircraft to shake itself to pieces in mid-air. Why was the aircraft shaking so much? The cockpit voice recorder's anomalous recording pattern holds the clue. The CVR was modified to run on one of the engine's generators during flight; a generator that wasn't working on the accident flight. Because the generator wasn't working, the pilots had to run the APU in order to have a second power source during the flight. Furthermore, the conversation that was recorded on the CVR showed that the first officer had to pay the catering bill before they could leave the gate, an indication that the airline was having financial difficulties. Those difficulties led the airline to cut down on maintenance and resort to using unapproved aircraft parts in their fleet. The bogus parts meant the vertical stabilizer was susceptible to greater vibration in flight, and the APU's mount was unstable. Both sets of vibrations eventually got into resonance with each other and exceeded the structural limitations of the aircraft, and it broke apart, killing everyone on board.
The Cessna that collided with PSA Flight 182 was equipped with a transponder, even though small aircraft were not required to carry transponders in 1978. But then you realize that the Cessna belonged to a flight academy; it would make sense that a flight school would exceed the minimum requirements of the time.
An accident on landing is worse than if something goes wrong in the air. You don't have any time or reason to prepare for a routine landing going suddenly wrong the way that an in-flight crisis gives the flight attendants reason to prepare for the worst.
Probably best demonstrated by the first episode of Season 5, Invisible Killer where Delta Air Lines Flight 191 encountered a weather phenomenon called a microburst. Records proved that the flight crew did everything right to recover when encountering one, but because they were coming in for a landing already, they were low enough that they just didn't have the time or the altitude to recover before hitting the ground.
This comes up in the US Airways 1549 episode as well. While they had enough time to warn passengers, they didn't have the time to go through the full emergency procedure, which was written with the assumption of a failure at or near cruising altitude (where pilots would have ample time to troubleshoot). While this didn't have any serious impact on the outcome, there are a few things they could have done to better their odds further, which would have given them a cushion in the event that things hadn't gone quite as well as they ultimately did.
Conversely, however, it's noted a couple of times across the series that incidents on/near the ground are potentially more survivable because there may be less force at impact and because if it's something like a fire, they can get evacuation started more quickly than a plane at cruising altitude (for example, part of what made Air Canada 797 so deadly was that by the time they were able to start evacuating, the fire had already been burning for a while, which incapacitated passengers and led to the flashover once the doors were opened). Additional height can be good in some circumstances, but it's very bad in others.
Also, while the extra distance does give the cabin more time to prepare, the flip side is that passengers have more time to realize and think about what's about to happen to them. While it may increase their chance of survival, that can be (and often is, based on the survivors' stories) an additional layer of trauma out of the experience. And then of course there's the cases where the passengers have warning but don't have a chance of survival (case in point, Alaska Airlines 261, which was completely out of control and unrecoverable in the final minutes before impact), in which case the awareness just makes their final minutes that much more agonizing.
Would the crash of TransColorado Flight 2286 have ever been solved if the captain survived the accident? Would there have been another accident involving a pilot on drugs?
Hospitals usually take blood and urine samples from pilots that survive crashes, so it's likely that they would've discovered he had been using drugs.
Not likely, since (AFAIR this was mentioned in the ep) the tests at the time were for high doses, while the captain had low amount of cocaine in his blood when he died.
Would the flight data recorder from PSA 1771 have yielded any information if it had been a solid state recorder instead of a tape recorder?
"Turboprop Terror", a very adequate name. The captain is found to be a very below average pilot with lots of red flags in his files, missed exams, checkrides and tests, complaints from fellow pilots about his incompetence and even a written recomendation for a dismissal. And yet, he managed to accumulate nearly 3500 flight hours and get himself promoted to a captain. Just wonder how many times he just barely missed a crash before, and how many similarly bad pilots also managed to slip through the cracks in the system. (Crossair 3597 instantly comes to mind...)
With the amount of information conveyed in the series, would the show be able to provide assistance in learning about aviation related professions?
As a matter of fact, it has been used as a framework to teach pilots.
Given the incredible interval of time between when MH 370 disappeared and when it crashed, even if by some miracle the flight recorders were found, would there even be anything substantial there to work with? Or would it turn out to be like Helios 522, where the most important piece of the sequence ended up being taped over?
Assuming the boxes do still have the data they recorded, they can still provide clues as to whether one of the pilots was alone in the cockpit at the moment of impact, and whether the pilot(s) were conscious during the last moments of the flight. The FDR in particular can show whether the pilot flying, if they were still conscious, was trying to ditch the plane at the last moment or not.
been used as a framework to teach pilots.