Originally Posted by
jumpseater
If as you suggest an AOC won’t prevent it, first para, what checks, balances and controls do you suggest? An AOC provides some top cover if adhered to for the operator or crew to cancel a trip. A PPL has none apart from the discipline of operating within the privileges of their license.
Your checks and balances in this event event should have been, licensed, proficiency, aircraft serviceability, airfield & navaid serviceability and weather as the basics. Surely that’s what’s required to make the go/no go decision? Access to all of those were available to the pilot and he decided to fly, why? Playing devils advocate, even if some of those basics listed above weren’t available, and a pilot still decided to fly, why?
What further checks and balances are you suggesting will have a meaningful impact, i.e. a ‘no fly’ decision, and who’s going to administer and pay for them?
my point is that we already have a great deal of checks and balances but if people are minded to break them then sometimes it ends badly. The issue is how things are enforced and how regulation is written with a rigor and attention such that it says what is intended. That way people who transgress can expect a consequence very many people know others who operate close to the wind and others find out usually when the tide has gone out and we read about it in an AAIB report. Ill leave you to read them for yourself however perhaps one start could be the warnings given about the man who died in his own AW139 in Norfolk. Why wasnt that dealt with years before?