'Bubba, the sandpit guy was hardly a loner in that regard. Most of them did a pretty good job. The sandpit guy has now hung up his spurs, and that concludes an interesting part of aviation history.
The SA guys did a good job in general. The NZ'er was an astute individual, worked well with the serious Canuck. Both of them were concerned with the veracity of a number of the crew histories. An audit of history was conducted well after your time and mine, by a tall, thin, very serious individual. This guy was the guy who refused to sign off a prince as an A320 captain in the pit, and resigned over the matter, as the company involved got another TRI to sign the prince off. With a grand total command time of 87 hours, (eight followed by a seven, no other numbers, zero etc..) the prince parked the shiny jet into the water with 143 total victims following a fluffed approach and GA and whifferdill-halfroll-backflip-nose plant into the brine. (At least 142 people and their families saw little amusement in the proceedings). So, the tall serious one looked at the histories and found that while most were correct, some were not. The NOTs were from all over the globe. While the % was not too bad, the actual numbers were sobering, you run out of fingers and toes counting. Two oddities stood out though, of guys who were universally considered to be P-51 rated, but investigation showed that was not the case, one was US, and the other was Japanese. Both actually did well for the company, arguably the US guy saved an aircraft, that was and is my view.
The review ended up with some career changes I believe, around 2012-2013 or so.
The NZ'er wasn't much liked in the end by the locals, nor was the Canuck to a great extent, both held a line on standards, think Pohang/MD82.
As an aside, anyone who survived the land of the morning calm should get a campaign medal:
Around '05, a really clean operator on the 300-605R flew the plane on a simple 4 sector day, SEL-CJU-PSN-CJU-SEL... nothing of interest, a nice outing. On Monday morning, going to his office, where he had a fairly important position, he was accosted by one of the chief pilots who advised him that a disciplinary meeting was to be held that morning considering his sacking. Why? for the flight arrival into PSN on the day before. After thinking back, the guy came to me, and asked me to review the flight data. We proceeded to the Safety BU, and I ran through the raw data, which looked nice, and then ran a replay of the QAR data, which looked the same, nice textbook approach. The two of us approached the fleet chief pilot, and showed him the data, he showed us the QAR report that he was accusing the captain of having committed. The data showed it was for the day before, only 24 hours out. There was no apology, or embarrassment, there was a flurry of activity to find out who the pilot was of the approach from the day before. Nothing else was ever said, which is I guess a compliment to the captain in it's own right. The program is diminished by the pathology that has existed, and which removal has proven to be rather difficult.
safe flying.
Walk on Freight; this is the industry that exists as a result of the decisions that the politicians, and economists have taken in your name, perhaps it is what is right.
Last edited by fdr; 2nd Mar 2019 at 04:42.