How does anyone explain the devastatingly different outcomes of the two commercial airline crashes in New York State?

In one, a crew faced with a total loss of power over New York City and no runway close enough for a crash landing managed to bring the plane and its 150 passengers down safely in the Hudson River.

In the other, a crew faced with icing — an acknowledged wintertime risk for which corrective procedures were available — apparently left the craft on autopilot and proceeded to make a routine approach to the Buffalo airport, ultimately losing control when the Bombardier Dash 8 went into a fatal stall.

The answer surely lies in the area of experience.

There's little doubt, surely, that a major factor in the successful attempt by US Airways pilot Chesley "Sully" Sullenberger to "land" his Airbus 320 in the river after the engines lost out to a flock of Canada geese was his long experience, having amassed 10,000 hours as a commercial pilot after a career in the air force.

Accomplishing his unprecedented feat was surely a product of his knowledge of the aircraft and his ability to make splitsecond decisions. But even he has since described the ordeal on Jan. 16 as "surreal" and the silence in the cockpit after both engines lost power as "shocking." He said that in the brief period that he guided the plane to the ditching in the river he felt "calm on the outside, turmoil on the inside."

We obviously have no idea what Marvin Renshaw, the pilot of Colgan Air flight 3407, or co-pilot Rebecca Shaw were thinking as the plane made its fatal descent last Thursday about eight miles northeast of the airport. But we do know that both had far less experience than Captain Sullenberger.

Although it will undoubtedly be many months before the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) files its final report on the terrible crash, initial indications are that there was nothing wrong with the plane and the cause was a lethal combination of bad weather and pilot error.

Although it's hardly surprising that the pilot and co-pilot were relatively inexperienced, the information gleaned from the flight recorders and eye-witness observations have raised a lot of questions that will have to be answered.

Perhaps the first and most important is the type of training Colgan Air flight crews have been given in an era of airline deregulation and resultant tough competition.

As one consequence of deregulation, Colgan Air, based in Virginia, has come to operate a fleet of 51turboprops that provide regional connections for Continental Connection (a brand name under which several commuter airline carriers and their holding companies operate service marketed exclusively by Continental Airlines), United Express and US Airways Express. Flight 3407 was an hour-long run between Newark, NJ and Buffalo.

One thing we do know about the potential training of flight crews is that it could include spending hours on a Dash 8 flight simulator in Toronto, and that there's precious little doubt that the simulator programs would include training on how to deal with icing problems.

Similarly, we do know, from the initial investigations, that the Dash 8's de-icing system was switched on, but we don't know how much reliance was placed on a system that was clearly no substitute for evasive actions, among them changing altitude and using full power. (Initial indications are that although the plane had been left on autopilot in contravention of the airline's rules, the crew did at some point switch on an anti-stall device designed to increase the speed of the plane by 20 knots and give more margin to recover from a stall if it occurs.)

Clearly, the most important objective of the NTSB probe will be the same one assigned to every coroner's jury: to determine how best to avoid any recurrence.

It will be interesting to see what recommendations, if any, come concerning the role played by deregulation.

A story out of Dallas on the subject should surely be seen as troubling.

The story disclosed that starting pay for a co-captain on a U.S. regional airline can be as low as $18,000 a year and that while Colgan captains make about $58,000 a year, first officers or co-pilots average about $27,000. The airline advertised in late 2007 for a captain's job that paid just $40 per flight hour and required 3,000 hours experience. In a listing last month for a co-pilot, it required only 600 hours of flight time.

The story said that despite repeated requests, Pinnacle Airlines of Memphis, Tenn., the parent of Colgan Air, would not say how much experience the captain and co-pilot had before they joined Colgan, or where they were trained.

One thing the new Obama administration should consider is re-regulation of commercial airlines, at least to the point of setting rigid minimum standards for the training of commercial flight crews.