Pinnacle's Foolhardy Pilots

Bad training? Poor engineering design? Or just plain stupidity?:

The transcript of their conversation as captured by the cockpit voice recorder suggests exhilaration. An air traffic controller with jurisdiction over the flight asked at one point, "3701, are you an RJ-200?"

"That's affirmative," one of the pilots replied.

"I've never seen you guys up at 41 there," she said.

Then there was laughter in the cockpit.

"Yeah, we're actually a, there's ah, we don't have any passengers on board, so we decided to have a little fun and come on up here," one of the pilots answered.

In the thin air, though, the engines had less thrust, and the plane slowed further. The nose pitched up as the autopilot tried to keep it at the assigned altitude, and then an automatic system began warning that the plane was approaching a "stall," in which there is too little lift to maintain flight.

"Dude, it's losing it," one pilot said, using an expletive. "Yeah," the other said.

But as an automatic system tried to push the nose down, to gain speed and prevent the stall, the pilots, for reasons that are unclear, overrode it. So the plane did stall, and the turbulent air flowing off the wings entered the engines, shutting them down.

"We don't have any engines," one of the pilots said. "You got to be kidding me."