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A New Jersey co-pilot was not qualified to fly a private charter aircraft that crash-landed near Teterboro Airport last May, killing him and the plane’s pilot.

Chris Monroe/Special to NorthJersey.com

Documents released Wednesday by the National Transportation Safety Board showed that the co-pilot, Jeffrey Alino, lacked sufficient hours of flying experience to fly the Learjet 35A and hadn’t scored well in his flight simulator training when he was hired by Trans-Pacific Air Charter in 2016.

Alino was at the controls for most of the flight from Philadelphia to Teterboro, but a transcript of the cockpit voice recorder reveals he became nervous about the landing and handed off the controls to the pilot, William Ramsey, less than a minute before the plane stalled and crashed in Carlstadt.

"I'm gonna give ya your controls okay?" the transcript shows Alino said to Ramsey.

"Alright. my controls," Ramsey said.

The transcript notes the sound of "strained breathing" and "high-frequency aerodynamic noise" as Ramsey struggled to regain control of the aircraft.

"Add airspeed," Alino said. "Airspeed. Airspeed. Airspeed."

"Stall," Ramsey said, in a strained voice.

"Yup," Alino said.

Seconds later, Ramsey cursed, and the recording ended.

Ramsey, 53, and Alino, 33, were killed. There were no passengers aboard.

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Alino, of Union, was hired in September 2016 and had 1,167 hours of flying time, Trans-Pacific records show.

According to company policy, Alino was rated 0 on a scale of 4 that determined whether a co-pilot was permitted to control the aircraft and under what circumstances.

A co-pilot with a rating of 0 would not be permitted to fly the aircraft.

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The director of operations for Trans-Pacific said Alino had improved and was about to be upgraded to a 1, which would have allowed him to fly the plane from the right seat, but with no passengers aboard and under the supervision of a management pilot.

By the company's standards, Alino would have needed 3,000 hours of flying time to control the aircraft from the left seat with no passengers aboard.

What Trans-Pacific didn't know, however, is that Alino had been hired by Short Hills Aviation Services, based in Morristown, and that he was scheduled to start on May 23, eight days after the crash.

Trans-Pacific is based in Van Nuys, California. Alino had moved from there to New Jersey a month before the crash.

According to NTSB interviews with Alino's flight instructor, he struggled with his simulator training.

The instructor noted that he didn't perform his takeoff process correctly or know what to look for. It took Alino "an hour to complete what should have taken about 30 minutes," the instructor noted.

Alino didn't know how to start the engines "because he had never started them before," the instructor said, and was unable to control his speed during a stall simulation.

Alino crashed on his first takeoff in the simulator, and he also crashed on an instrument-guided landing, a scenario similar to what he would encounter the day of the crash.

Alino's records show he spent a total of 24.7 hours in the flight training simulator in September 2016.

Alino especially struggled with approaches and landings, scoring "not yet proficient — more training required" on all but his last session in the simulator, when he was rated "proficient."

His scorecard also showed that he struggled with positional awareness, situational awareness and workload management.

Mary Schiavo, a former inspector general for the U.S. Department of Transportation, said insufficient training has been an issue.

"We’ve seen it in so many crashes," she said.

Sometimes in the rush to get pilots into the cockpit, airlines fail to ensure they have sufficient training. And the fact that a pilot struggles with training doesn't mean he or she can't learn and improve, she said.

"Everybody wants to say it’s second nature. In reality, no," said Schiavo, who's a trained pilot. "Everybody has a learning curve. Nobody's born to do it."

Though there has only been one fatal crash in commercial aviation in the U.S. since 2009, general aviation has a persistent problem with deadly crashes. In 2017, 347 people died in 209 general aviation accidents, according to the Federal Aviation Administration.

The issue appears on the NTSB's list of "most wanted" safety improvements.

According to the NTSB, about half of fatal aviation crashes between 2008 and 2014 resulted from pilots' losing control of the plane. Loss of control contributed to 1,194 deaths during that period, the board said.