REDUCING THE CHANCES-OF STUFF-UPS
Someone poignantly posted on the thread about the new year's eve disaster when six died in a seaplane on a branch of the Hawkesbury just north of Sydney, that the thought of wishing anyone a "Happy New Year" to some degree stuck in his throat. Which for me prompted the beginning of a line of thought to do with taking a look back to possibly find a way to reduce the number of careless accidents in the year ahead.
How to inculcate in the novice or in the more experienced who repeatedly "gets away with it again" a revitalised sense of an active awareness of the pitfalls of inattention or the cock-sure and dangerous belief that they have the game scunned?
Ossie Osgood of Arnhem Air Charter saw to it that all new recruits to his company ploughed through and read a list of prescribed books including 'Fate is the Hunter' and 'Sigh for a Merlin' so as to acquire an appreciation of the stand-point of those who had gone before and who had the gift to impart in their writings the various key factors that helped to ensure their repeated survival in the hostile environment in which the business of flying has always functioned. Not just their survival, but their newly discovered ability not to be stupid, but to be realistic in assessing every potential hazard.
Ossie was the mentor supreme. He wanted his pilots to think about those who had stuffed up. He wanted to talk with them about what they thought killed Smithy. Or killed Charles Ulm. And what it was saved men like PG (Bill) Taylor from disaster time and time again. But he could not teach them how to take the calculated risk. He knew, and they soon knew, that you cannot pick away at your quota of coal without doing it essentially on your own at the coalface. If on the other hand, Ossie found that he could not get anywhere with certain individuals (whom he soon realised he had initially misjudged and had acted on an erroneous gut feeling in employing them) he would then in a fatherly way take them aside and use his well tuned powers of persuasion to point the object of his disappointment in another direction to that of being the reincarnation of James Bigglesworth.
In John Gunn's book , 'The Defeat of Distance' , there are early passages that tell how the Queensland and Northern Territory AIr Service emerged out of a combination of business acumen (Fergus McMaster, Ainslie Templeton), operational nous and caution (Hudson Fysh) and sheer gung-ho balls for the adventure (Paul McGuiness).
Ossie lamented the passing of the days of pioneering flight but at the same time knew that the future was one that would be driven and held together by a new breed of men and women more attune to pressing buttons than discovering the roots of their craft. Shiny bums devoid of first hand experience of the real character of the business would be employed sitting at their desks devising new programs of risk management and occupational health and safety. Brave new (inevitable) world!