late developer
30th Dec 2006, 01:41
General Apology
============
Look guys and girls I am genuinely sorry if you are offended by my somewhat acerbic style. I know that isn't the half of it. Really I am sorry I have brought out this personal offense taken by some of you. I don't want to be banned from posting in PPRuNE because from time to time I think I see things which need airing here. So I guess I'll just have to be a lot more circumspect to survive. This DUI debate is of course very important, but dissenting views have largely been mocked mercilessly from the start. Anyone posting a dissenting view now has to be really thick-skinned. Thick-skinned types might be a little acerbic or they might be more benign...I'm told to be more benign...ok...I'll try, but I am naturally impatient to reach conclusions, not always good in many matters pertaining to aviation I know, but sometimes swift investigation is better than fending off requests for data with habitual caution.
Please do me a favour before commenting again on my personal attributes...please try and read some of this first.
Evidence
=======
Some now want me to produce evidence to support my views. Well I do try to be quantitative when it is possible. There is of course very little data on this alcohol/flying subject, so maybe it might help if you understood a bit about my experience with alcohol and aviation which is just one person's experience like all of yours. I know some pilots half my age have flown 747s and I have never even had a multi-rating but I do, vCCJ permitting, still have a good brain and it can't help but to absorb a fair bit of knowledge over half a century, especially when I have studied more intensively more broadly and more often than an average PP. I am not a master of any particular subject however, so I will accept that the Jack of All Trades label might be fair criticism.
I will say however that I know that lawyers and PPs study for their qualifications (some of it same as me in both cases). I can't accept that the personal investment in having become either in 2006 so noteworthy as to declare these as particularly special vocations any more. I have made members of both those vocations rethink their positions using my own knowledge.
Assuming I was 20 years younger perhaps, what more need I have done that I couldn't have done quite straightforwardly that I hadn't already done 3 years ago in order to have escaped the personality trap and be well on my way to my first command by now? I appreciate many pilots (and lawyers too no doubt) have to work darn hard to get their qualifications. I don't mean to belittle them, but some of us are born lucky or unlucky enough to pass these now routine and structured challenges quite straightforwardly.
I could never be a Neil Armstrong or a Chuck Yeager or a Lord Denning but I can still bat a bit with my straightforwardly soaked up logic-training, science, aviation and legal knowledge that some of you have got so tight-a**sed about.
Despite my lowly PPL which has been rubbed a little recently, I have been also been in and around aviation a long time and not just GA. I fully admit I don't have pilot qualifications or engineering qualifications that could possibly hold a candle against most of yours.
But that doesn't per se disqualify me from holding a valid view, or indeed from making a strong assertion for debate that might go against the grain, does it? Well as you know, I don't think it should.
I know some of my posts have been tortuous, and this will inevitably look to be one such, and my skills as a writer and critic vary daily. Please bear with me on this post though, as it might be my last if it isn't well received. I was rather hoping for a degree of tolerance of the less good posts balanced against my better contributions.
I am perhaps in a position that many of you wishing to expose problems can only dream about...I actually have no aviation axe to grind except as a consumer, and no aviation-connected employer or customer base to be wary of. I believe that relieves me of a lot of daily stress and it is a big reason why I didn't follow through to be a PP. I am old, but I could have bought something with the money. Performance has never been an issue in anything I have tried to do well. Forgive me if I have relaxed a bit too much in here.
That accounts for part of my 'attitude' if you like.
My non-aviation life frees me to comment on anything I see that I dare describe, or indeed anything I think I know enough about to hypothesise about (subject to forum rights I know).
I have always been a details person. I believe I get to log things which might impinge on aviation safety more than most, because I have generally always been prepared to temper my comments retrospectively in order to explore an observation past a weak excuse or barrier.
I am not going to disclose my identity further by telling you chapter and verse, but I can tell you I know from first hand how a multitude of aviation safety issues can regularly get lost in legal and cost wrangles, and how unfair pressures get exerted.
More down to earth I lost a pilot friend in a notorious accident that has been mentioned here a number of times. Nothing to do with drink, but it was one of those which caused a comprehensive rethink. Until that person died, few people agreed that there might be a general problem. He is not the only true friend who has died in the cockpit. The second one was routine after you explore all the non-routine inputs.
There are of course mountains of uncategorised incidents and accidents waiting for the lightbulb moment that one day might group them under one new heading for action.
Alcohol and drugs may or may be one of them. Undocumented human factors in fast turnaround situations and loco maintenance might be one or two more, unquantified EMF interference from effectively uncontrolled carriage of PEDs in baggage might be another, the tendency of the last 15-20 years to spawn each new aircraft type and engine type out of the test certification of its predecessor type might be another.
More appropriate to the alchol debate, I also was exposed to candid discussion of at least one fatality with a drunk in charge of an aircraft which is an incident probably lost in the annals, and which received much more sensitive treatment than for example Henri Paul received afte his death in the Alma tunnel. Luckily this one killed no-one else. No-one likes speaking ill of the dead.
Changes in culture/the generation gap?
=============================
I have been socially drunk with pilots, drunk with lawyers, drunk with all sorts.
Not for some years now. Not because I am a reformed alcoholic, but because my life grew away from the kind of work and social life where it is commonplace.
In recent years I have found myself worked alongside people who set aside regular times during the working week to go out and drink heavily. I did not get on with them. Then I remember I worked under a pair of very skilled individuals, one of whom looked to keep himself pretty fit and was a regular at certain Ibiza nightclubs at weekends throughout the summer. It was evident that recreational drugs were part of the scene. He talked about the particular club scene there with as much enthusiasm as I used to talk about flying. I started by liking him, but I started guessing that his apparent fitness and brightness wasn't entirely natural.
Later I worked daily with a particular woman peer whom I got on well with but who was 20 years younger than me. Her experience in some areas well exceeded mine and vice-versa. We achieved some excellent results together. One day we were discussing in a group what each of us were to do on a Friday night and she volunteered she was going out with some of her girlfriends to get drunk. She said it in such a way as to leave us with no illusion that they really might well be going out deliberately to get drunk. Yes "well-lagered" she said. She and her friends knew exactly where to start at the cheapest cost for the alcohol, and then they would move on she said. Not a hen night in the old sense. Just a night out with mates. As I had earned sufficient social and office-related capital to do so, I challenged her and asked if she really meant they were planning an evening around getting drunk. She did. It'll be a great laugh she said, we'll all be "bladdered" and then we'll hit XXXX (club). She was one of the most bubbly good fun types you could meet, with a senior role and a wicked line in office politics. I think she WAS one of the naturally everyday bright stars in the office, but ... she took sudden sick days that I never have. And the reasons were sometimes related to overdoing it. But, she was a survivor of all calamities. Happy as a skylark every day. Last I heard, the company was down the pan but I am sure her networks provided a liferaft.
But...I couldn't understand the deliberately drunk bit, and she couldn't understand my surprise. Was she just being more honest than me about what young people have always done when going out to bars?
I have been an infrequent binge-drinker in younger days but I never recall my friends of I ever saying were are going out tonight to "get drunk" or "bladdered" or "p**sed" unless we wished to exagerrate a point about a bad day. We were just out, and drink was usually part of it, not absolutely central to it. I was only sick from drink three times - once as a 14 y old when I first tried Newcastle Brown (3 glasses of it on top of one of Tartan bitter!), once again much later when my beer stomach got introduced good and proper to spirits on a stag night, and once again much later when I was just trying to be the last standing at a black tie do. I was the last standing but I cheated by secretly throwing up! In my younger days I deliberately took chances sometimes and drove over the limit. I have lived a homelife where a bottle of wine got opened every evening, but I haven't for some years. In recent years I have enjoyed the occasional tasting of malt whiskies with good friends but in part-filled glasses smaller than eggcups because we just can't be doing with thick heads at our age! I also remember a private business lunch with someone years ago whom I'd been led to respect by a lot by people you might find easier to respect a lot, but this one obviously did a line of coke while he said he was at the porcelain, and sure enough 18 months later he fell uneasily from grace without any assistance from me.
As it turns out, two of the examples I gave here are non-UK citizens and off course the PPRuNe audience is perhaps 40% non-UK. Obviously different cultures support different angles on the use of alcohol and recreational drugs. I don't have specific examples to quote you, but I think it is fairly well aaccepted that alcohol abuse was much more prevalent in a number of so-called Eastern European states than in UK and most EU. It also seems fairly well accepted that Americans generally consume more food than is good for them, and certainly top any league table of major states when measures on such things. I am not sure if the same goes for drink.
Conclusion
========
From my own long and varied working experience, I deduce that in the UK at least drink and drugs is potentially a more serious problem in all jobs than it ever was. I am only aware of two valid initiatives that reduced the problem and both were overt zero tolerance (automatic ban for drink drivers and one other non-aviation industry initiative). I deduce that the huge growth in aviation in recent years has probably lowered the average age of airline pilots significantly in UK and US. Couple this with the likelihood that less responsible use of alcohol (whether or not ever termed alcoholism) is probably both more prevalent in younger people and particularly in the current younger generation (especially in UK) then we might have a growing alcohol problem in the skies. I also deduce from general reading over many years that as alcohol abuse was much more prevalent in so called Eastern European states than in UK, that any migration of labour from those states to EU is likely to bring use of alcohol further into the risk equation for the worldwide airliner fleet. It may go for migration from other less obvious states too. Two of my examples are from the Southern hemisphere.
Assumptions
=========
I accept that I have not discussed here any factors that may have improved the outlook and offset any of my arguments including the provision of counselling.
Other Threads I have contributed to or started
===================================
I disagree particularly with BOFHs contention that there is nothing of concern in the faults I found in the F28. I know the thing flies. I know my F28 isn't a Space Shuttle. I also know that someone decided that because it is an F28 not a Space Shuttle they weren't going to bother preventing me seeing the seamier side. I don't even expect restaurants like that. Why should anyone expect aircraft like it? I know it is an unquantified statement but, like the engineer said, it begs the automatic question, what else is on the 'to do list' if they haven't fixed this?
Irrespective of BOFHs hollow bet, or of when the next major check is due, I would like to think that aircraft will not remain in that state by the time I might next fly in it. Or are you guys saying that all other things being equal, it can stay just like that for another two months?
Further Apology
============
I am sorry this is so long, but it is of course largely a draft. If this were a short essay under coursework/homework conditions to decide whether or not I passed an exam then I would admit well I could have printed it out and edited it and improved it several times by Monday. However, I just don't have that much time. So please can you just accept it as presented under exam conditions within a limited time. I have run out of time and I know my marks will suffer.
I can see from the declared opprobrium (yes I did Latin and was top of the class at that too, but what was the point?) that some of you are as anxious to see me disappear never to be heard of again as I am that there should be zero tolerance of alcohol and drug abuse in aviation.
I respect your view. Will you still not respect mine?
============
Look guys and girls I am genuinely sorry if you are offended by my somewhat acerbic style. I know that isn't the half of it. Really I am sorry I have brought out this personal offense taken by some of you. I don't want to be banned from posting in PPRuNE because from time to time I think I see things which need airing here. So I guess I'll just have to be a lot more circumspect to survive. This DUI debate is of course very important, but dissenting views have largely been mocked mercilessly from the start. Anyone posting a dissenting view now has to be really thick-skinned. Thick-skinned types might be a little acerbic or they might be more benign...I'm told to be more benign...ok...I'll try, but I am naturally impatient to reach conclusions, not always good in many matters pertaining to aviation I know, but sometimes swift investigation is better than fending off requests for data with habitual caution.
Please do me a favour before commenting again on my personal attributes...please try and read some of this first.
Evidence
=======
Some now want me to produce evidence to support my views. Well I do try to be quantitative when it is possible. There is of course very little data on this alcohol/flying subject, so maybe it might help if you understood a bit about my experience with alcohol and aviation which is just one person's experience like all of yours. I know some pilots half my age have flown 747s and I have never even had a multi-rating but I do, vCCJ permitting, still have a good brain and it can't help but to absorb a fair bit of knowledge over half a century, especially when I have studied more intensively more broadly and more often than an average PP. I am not a master of any particular subject however, so I will accept that the Jack of All Trades label might be fair criticism.
I will say however that I know that lawyers and PPs study for their qualifications (some of it same as me in both cases). I can't accept that the personal investment in having become either in 2006 so noteworthy as to declare these as particularly special vocations any more. I have made members of both those vocations rethink their positions using my own knowledge.
Assuming I was 20 years younger perhaps, what more need I have done that I couldn't have done quite straightforwardly that I hadn't already done 3 years ago in order to have escaped the personality trap and be well on my way to my first command by now? I appreciate many pilots (and lawyers too no doubt) have to work darn hard to get their qualifications. I don't mean to belittle them, but some of us are born lucky or unlucky enough to pass these now routine and structured challenges quite straightforwardly.
I could never be a Neil Armstrong or a Chuck Yeager or a Lord Denning but I can still bat a bit with my straightforwardly soaked up logic-training, science, aviation and legal knowledge that some of you have got so tight-a**sed about.
Despite my lowly PPL which has been rubbed a little recently, I have been also been in and around aviation a long time and not just GA. I fully admit I don't have pilot qualifications or engineering qualifications that could possibly hold a candle against most of yours.
But that doesn't per se disqualify me from holding a valid view, or indeed from making a strong assertion for debate that might go against the grain, does it? Well as you know, I don't think it should.
I know some of my posts have been tortuous, and this will inevitably look to be one such, and my skills as a writer and critic vary daily. Please bear with me on this post though, as it might be my last if it isn't well received. I was rather hoping for a degree of tolerance of the less good posts balanced against my better contributions.
I am perhaps in a position that many of you wishing to expose problems can only dream about...I actually have no aviation axe to grind except as a consumer, and no aviation-connected employer or customer base to be wary of. I believe that relieves me of a lot of daily stress and it is a big reason why I didn't follow through to be a PP. I am old, but I could have bought something with the money. Performance has never been an issue in anything I have tried to do well. Forgive me if I have relaxed a bit too much in here.
That accounts for part of my 'attitude' if you like.
My non-aviation life frees me to comment on anything I see that I dare describe, or indeed anything I think I know enough about to hypothesise about (subject to forum rights I know).
I have always been a details person. I believe I get to log things which might impinge on aviation safety more than most, because I have generally always been prepared to temper my comments retrospectively in order to explore an observation past a weak excuse or barrier.
I am not going to disclose my identity further by telling you chapter and verse, but I can tell you I know from first hand how a multitude of aviation safety issues can regularly get lost in legal and cost wrangles, and how unfair pressures get exerted.
More down to earth I lost a pilot friend in a notorious accident that has been mentioned here a number of times. Nothing to do with drink, but it was one of those which caused a comprehensive rethink. Until that person died, few people agreed that there might be a general problem. He is not the only true friend who has died in the cockpit. The second one was routine after you explore all the non-routine inputs.
There are of course mountains of uncategorised incidents and accidents waiting for the lightbulb moment that one day might group them under one new heading for action.
Alcohol and drugs may or may be one of them. Undocumented human factors in fast turnaround situations and loco maintenance might be one or two more, unquantified EMF interference from effectively uncontrolled carriage of PEDs in baggage might be another, the tendency of the last 15-20 years to spawn each new aircraft type and engine type out of the test certification of its predecessor type might be another.
More appropriate to the alchol debate, I also was exposed to candid discussion of at least one fatality with a drunk in charge of an aircraft which is an incident probably lost in the annals, and which received much more sensitive treatment than for example Henri Paul received afte his death in the Alma tunnel. Luckily this one killed no-one else. No-one likes speaking ill of the dead.
Changes in culture/the generation gap?
=============================
I have been socially drunk with pilots, drunk with lawyers, drunk with all sorts.
Not for some years now. Not because I am a reformed alcoholic, but because my life grew away from the kind of work and social life where it is commonplace.
In recent years I have found myself worked alongside people who set aside regular times during the working week to go out and drink heavily. I did not get on with them. Then I remember I worked under a pair of very skilled individuals, one of whom looked to keep himself pretty fit and was a regular at certain Ibiza nightclubs at weekends throughout the summer. It was evident that recreational drugs were part of the scene. He talked about the particular club scene there with as much enthusiasm as I used to talk about flying. I started by liking him, but I started guessing that his apparent fitness and brightness wasn't entirely natural.
Later I worked daily with a particular woman peer whom I got on well with but who was 20 years younger than me. Her experience in some areas well exceeded mine and vice-versa. We achieved some excellent results together. One day we were discussing in a group what each of us were to do on a Friday night and she volunteered she was going out with some of her girlfriends to get drunk. She said it in such a way as to leave us with no illusion that they really might well be going out deliberately to get drunk. Yes "well-lagered" she said. She and her friends knew exactly where to start at the cheapest cost for the alcohol, and then they would move on she said. Not a hen night in the old sense. Just a night out with mates. As I had earned sufficient social and office-related capital to do so, I challenged her and asked if she really meant they were planning an evening around getting drunk. She did. It'll be a great laugh she said, we'll all be "bladdered" and then we'll hit XXXX (club). She was one of the most bubbly good fun types you could meet, with a senior role and a wicked line in office politics. I think she WAS one of the naturally everyday bright stars in the office, but ... she took sudden sick days that I never have. And the reasons were sometimes related to overdoing it. But, she was a survivor of all calamities. Happy as a skylark every day. Last I heard, the company was down the pan but I am sure her networks provided a liferaft.
But...I couldn't understand the deliberately drunk bit, and she couldn't understand my surprise. Was she just being more honest than me about what young people have always done when going out to bars?
I have been an infrequent binge-drinker in younger days but I never recall my friends of I ever saying were are going out tonight to "get drunk" or "bladdered" or "p**sed" unless we wished to exagerrate a point about a bad day. We were just out, and drink was usually part of it, not absolutely central to it. I was only sick from drink three times - once as a 14 y old when I first tried Newcastle Brown (3 glasses of it on top of one of Tartan bitter!), once again much later when my beer stomach got introduced good and proper to spirits on a stag night, and once again much later when I was just trying to be the last standing at a black tie do. I was the last standing but I cheated by secretly throwing up! In my younger days I deliberately took chances sometimes and drove over the limit. I have lived a homelife where a bottle of wine got opened every evening, but I haven't for some years. In recent years I have enjoyed the occasional tasting of malt whiskies with good friends but in part-filled glasses smaller than eggcups because we just can't be doing with thick heads at our age! I also remember a private business lunch with someone years ago whom I'd been led to respect by a lot by people you might find easier to respect a lot, but this one obviously did a line of coke while he said he was at the porcelain, and sure enough 18 months later he fell uneasily from grace without any assistance from me.
As it turns out, two of the examples I gave here are non-UK citizens and off course the PPRuNe audience is perhaps 40% non-UK. Obviously different cultures support different angles on the use of alcohol and recreational drugs. I don't have specific examples to quote you, but I think it is fairly well aaccepted that alcohol abuse was much more prevalent in a number of so-called Eastern European states than in UK and most EU. It also seems fairly well accepted that Americans generally consume more food than is good for them, and certainly top any league table of major states when measures on such things. I am not sure if the same goes for drink.
Conclusion
========
From my own long and varied working experience, I deduce that in the UK at least drink and drugs is potentially a more serious problem in all jobs than it ever was. I am only aware of two valid initiatives that reduced the problem and both were overt zero tolerance (automatic ban for drink drivers and one other non-aviation industry initiative). I deduce that the huge growth in aviation in recent years has probably lowered the average age of airline pilots significantly in UK and US. Couple this with the likelihood that less responsible use of alcohol (whether or not ever termed alcoholism) is probably both more prevalent in younger people and particularly in the current younger generation (especially in UK) then we might have a growing alcohol problem in the skies. I also deduce from general reading over many years that as alcohol abuse was much more prevalent in so called Eastern European states than in UK, that any migration of labour from those states to EU is likely to bring use of alcohol further into the risk equation for the worldwide airliner fleet. It may go for migration from other less obvious states too. Two of my examples are from the Southern hemisphere.
Assumptions
=========
I accept that I have not discussed here any factors that may have improved the outlook and offset any of my arguments including the provision of counselling.
Other Threads I have contributed to or started
===================================
I disagree particularly with BOFHs contention that there is nothing of concern in the faults I found in the F28. I know the thing flies. I know my F28 isn't a Space Shuttle. I also know that someone decided that because it is an F28 not a Space Shuttle they weren't going to bother preventing me seeing the seamier side. I don't even expect restaurants like that. Why should anyone expect aircraft like it? I know it is an unquantified statement but, like the engineer said, it begs the automatic question, what else is on the 'to do list' if they haven't fixed this?
Irrespective of BOFHs hollow bet, or of when the next major check is due, I would like to think that aircraft will not remain in that state by the time I might next fly in it. Or are you guys saying that all other things being equal, it can stay just like that for another two months?
Further Apology
============
I am sorry this is so long, but it is of course largely a draft. If this were a short essay under coursework/homework conditions to decide whether or not I passed an exam then I would admit well I could have printed it out and edited it and improved it several times by Monday. However, I just don't have that much time. So please can you just accept it as presented under exam conditions within a limited time. I have run out of time and I know my marks will suffer.
I can see from the declared opprobrium (yes I did Latin and was top of the class at that too, but what was the point?) that some of you are as anxious to see me disappear never to be heard of again as I am that there should be zero tolerance of alcohol and drug abuse in aviation.
I respect your view. Will you still not respect mine?