RAT5 - I agree wholeheartedly with you about Airmanship v v SOP's. But how did it get like this? Who created this situation? Not the pilots!
In almost 40 years in this business I've seen SOP's morph from being a set of guidelines for the wise, into a rigid and obscure labyrinth of Do's & Don'ts,
Pilots don't know WHY certain things are SOP? Who can blame them? Often the reasons are hangovers from a past incident or accident an airline had decades ago on a now defunct fleet, or from some personal obsession a Training Manager has carried with him.
New joiners aren't privy to all the history of a company, and the attitude of so many "Trainers" is - 'Don't ask stupid questions, just do what you're told'.
Asking a stupid question (why do we do that SOP) may be taken as a sign of impertinence (you're NEW here, are you questioning us?), or lack of knowledge (keep your mouth shut or you'll show your ignorance). Rote Learning and Robotic Repetition is all that is REQUIRED of them.
Quite often new SOP's are a knee jerk reaction by Management to a recent 'undesireable event' and are clearly efforts at slamming the stable door after the horse has bolted. In modern parlance 'Management Ass Covering'. These are often operationally impractical directives that get filed in the OM-A, until some poor guy gets cornered and falls foul of them, and then it's a Gotcha! I can give tons of examples of those!
Training Managers will tell you they have to write EVERYTHING down because of cross cultural/language impediments that make it necessary to cater to the 'lowest common denominator' in their pilot group. There's some truth in that. Unfortunately the result is that EVERYBODY is dragged down to that level - the performing monkey.
Lets not forget the Fear Factor either.
I don't know if you've worked outside of Europe (you're Ryanair, right?) - but in many parts of the world, pilots live in a Fear and Punishment Culture. Certain societies believe human error or failure is best prevented or dealt with by punishment. This creates an atmosphere of fear. Fear to question. Fear to think for yourself. The reasoning becomes 'If I just follow the SOP's they can't punish me, even if they're stupid SOP's'. So fear of punishment and fear of losing your job/upgrade becomes the driving behaviour. Not Airmanship.
Oh, here's a good one for starters. One of my personal favourites.
You push back in icing conditions and start #1. You then turn on the Eng Anti Ice to protect that engine while starting #2.
But the Airbus SOP is to NOT switch on the anti ice until you do the After Start Checklist.
Airmanship would tell you otherwise. But in my airline, if you switch on the #1 Anti Ice before doing the After Start Checklist - you will be marked down on the PC/RT.
Its not SOP.
PS Airbus is a large part of this problem because of the often inexplicable and mind bogglingly prescriptiveSOP's they produce. I believe their agenda is indeed to engineer pilots into being Robots, all the more easily replaced in a future generation of Artificially Intelligent aircraft . Flown Robotically.
Last edited by Killaroo; 25th Apr 2018 at 03:48.