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By Tom Blackwell

Alan Eugeni had been flying at Air Georgian for only a month when he said the first one happened.

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Landing a Bombardier CRJ100 as the flight’s first officer, he said he pulled back the throttle to slow down the 50-passenger plane, but the engine on one side kept roaring ahead. Unable to get the jet to respond, Eugeni and the captain shut it down and made an emergency landing with a single engine, according to Eugeni.

The pilots, he said, duly reported the defect to their maintenance department and assumed it would be fixed, then went through exactly the same crisis the next day, the flaw clearly not remedied.

By the end of his not-quite two years at Georgian — a contract provider that transports 1.5 million passengers a year in North America under the Air Canada Express brand — Eugeni charges that he had two more emergency landings, the kind of unsettling event he said pilots at bigger carriers might experience once or twice in a 25-year career.

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