How did the ET pilots fail to recognise a failure that must heve been just about the sole topic of conversation in the crew room for the previous few weeks, analysed and discussed to death by everyone on the fleet?
Whats a crew room?
My comment is obviously facetious but it’s there to highlight that the way we share information has changed significantly over the last decade.
I now arrive at the gate 55 mins before departure to meet an F/O that I often have never met, we work together and then his/her name will ring a bell when it’s on my roster six months later but I can’t picture them.
I certainly don’t chat with other Captains as was the way when I joined up many years ago.
The safety related information we get sent can be pored over and dissected in an armchair and discussed online........or it can be deleted without reading between feeding the cat and putting the rubbish out.
Nobody knows if the latter has occurred.
It is easy to become isolated from the company ‘safety culture’ even if it is a strong one.
Putting a Safety Notice out digitally is very very cheap. When faced with a training issue/problem, it is far more attractive commercially to take this route and regulators appear happy to allow companies to deal with most training issues in this manner. The person who decides whether to bring 500 pilots into the classroom/ simulator v’s firing off a digital memo is financially incentivised to choose the latter.
I will be interested to read how Ethiopian responded to the Lion crash. I will be analysing whether or not the head of their Safety Department knew, without doubt, that every one of their Max pilots was fully aware of how the MCAS event manifested itself, and had at least chair-flown their response regarding disconnecting the stab trim cut-out switches.
If their chosen strategy involved no method of confirmation that each pilot fully understood those things then it was insufficient.