Originally Posted by
Lonewolf_50
I guess we have a few posters here from the "the hatch just blew" school of accident investigation. I agree with you, though, that this whole thing is highly politicized, which helps nothing.
I've been reading the observations from experienced flight deck pros on PPRuNe for a bit over 10 years (so I am a relative newby).
What is rather apparent from soaking that all up is that there is NOT an international standard for airline pilots that any of us can comfortably assume when we sit down in the tube and strap that seat belt on while the CC brief us on the O2 mask and where the exits are. Culture informs cockpit culture; lessons learned sometimes aren't; corporate cultures - not just national culture - have influences that may or may not have been addressed in the testimony in re what you can assume that a given crew on a flight deck does or can do. After decades of folding in the hard lessons learned in the interest of safety, I am not impressed by those who will stick their heads in the sand and pretend that those lessons have been spread evenly across all passenger carrying organizations.
The 777 @ SFO reopened that can of worms. But even that crash points to something else also - being comfortable with one system, and then transitioning to another system where some functions are "similar but different" ... can lead to technical surprise and crew confusion. The remedy to that is training and system mastery: where's that as a priority? (Was the Captain in the ET Max crash well served by that, training? Color me skeptical).
There seems to be a problem, that a few posts in this thread demonstrate, with confronting the fact that not all flight deck crews are equal in ability nor in experience. (FWIW, the US regulators made a decision to demand 1500 hours experience before carrying passengers, as compared to 200 hours in a variety of other countries, to include maybe a few in Europe. How much that helps safety I don't know, but I don't think it hurt).
But that's one data point of many that hardly addresses the issues of assaults on training/recency/currency due to financial pressure.
None of the above relieves Boeing of: (1) some (IMO) bizarre choices in implementing the systems in the Max (single point of failure being one such choice in re AoA signal and triggering ... ) and (2) how crews were taken by surprise by a new feature due at least in part to the roll out/implementation scheme.
Those are causal factors related to the machine, and to training philosophy, but I digress.
I will ask posters to stop with the hair pulling in re someone speaking a truth - not all systems that produce Captains and FOs are equal. Well, no, they aren't. (I won't begin to offer which is the best, but anyone running an airline and/or a national regulatory agency sure as hell ought to be looking into that ...)
FACT for you: some airlines are so egregiously bad that certain nations or aviation authorities ban them from their airspace.
It isn't their machines that are the problem, it's the wet ware.
If one is to believe PPRuNe's collective memorey/experience* base of flight deck professionals over the course of 20 years of putting stuff down into internet posts, there is a willful failure demonstrated (in the posts here) to confront the variabilty of FD crews across the globe where some causal factors are Not The Machine.
And of course, some factors are related to The Machine.
Unbunch your knickers.
What irks me about this political process (as reported in the news article, so who knows how much of it is even right?) is that someone seems to be looking for a single smoking gun barrel.
Sorry, that's wrong headed.
A gatling gun is what's smoking.
I asked of a few friends here which hospital in our country they would go to with a life threatening illness. One came out top, a couple good and the rest forget it. So it is with airlines and pilots and I am at a loss to understand why Joe Public things they are all the same. Nothing else is. All medical matters are regulated internationally and national to WHO guidelines yet nobody really believes they are all the same.
To Lonewolf
In an airline that I worked for I reckoned on a scale of 1-10 that most pilots were 1-5. Some 5-8 and a few scraping along at 10 where 10= can just pass annual checks. Where 1= nothing and I mean nothing would get past them.
And that Airline was No 1
Then the airlines are the same where No1 is like the No. 1 hospital - a centre of excellence. The worst at 10 is, along with hundreds of others, banned from flying in the EU.
So it. isn't a mystery.
The best pilots in the best airlines are probably 100 times better than the worst in the worst. Now, I realise I am no being dead accurate in these stats but they are not far wrong.
And like my pals who know which hospital go to and even which consultant to see there, I know who to fly with.
Happy flying
Y