Originally Posted by
FWRWATPLX2
So, one fine day, flying GA, after lunch with the boys, a fellow Pilot from a competing Charter company dashed out to his aeroplane, rushed the preflight, tookoff, next thing I heard was a faltering engine, then a thud with a lot of dust. In his rush to preflight and takeoff, he forgot to check the fuel selector.
Is it therefore unwise and unprofessional to call out such stupidity and warn others or just use weasel words and tiptoe around the "real" issue, the Pilot's Error?
What are current statistics for Pilot Error, something on the order of 50% for airline accidents involve Human Error and at least 80% for all Aviation accidents? Face up to it. Being a professional means you face up to that fact, know you are not perfect and work your ass off to mitigate the risk factors and human error.
Or, don't. I don't care. Just hope I am not your passenger. I have enjoyed my career for 36 years, no accidents, no incidents, no violations, in the 47 countries I have operated and seven ATPLs.
The real question here is ‘how many accidents do we have to have due to fuel selection errors before we admit a systemic design problem that needs to be addressed’.
After 5 years of writing accident and incident reports as a lead investigator I have never seen or produced a report that has Pilot error as the SOLE cause of an accident.
An aircraft should never be released to service with a known problem that can cascade very quickly to a loss of control. As a Check Captain I have seen a lot of mishandling in the Sim that often leads to repeats due to being out of prescribed limits, it never leads to crash or loss of control i.e it may be messy but all in all modern airliners are very forgiving. To say that a design flaw that leads to total loss of control when slightly mishandled is an accident purely from pilot error ignores ALL of the systemic failures that put those pilots in that position.