Originally Posted by
glofish
Anything can f*ck up, humans, mechanics, even an almighty computer program. It's the recovery, the overcoming of such incidents that matters. Many recent ground course refresher gurus in the aviation industry have found a trendy word for it: Resilience. What is not invoked though, is the fact that you can only be resilient if you can fall back on something else, mainly basics, experience, grown instincts. However, the modern industry has deprived its offsprings of that. It puts bums in hot seats with 250 hours of mainly synthetic or schematic training, sometimes without any meaningful solo exposure. Now we are surprised that pilots confronted with incidents did not fall back on the most simple and common sense escape, named flying...... Let's face it: They can't and it's not their fault.
This begs the question if there is a way out. The industry has relentlessly said 'sure, we will simply install some more automations, limiters, inhibitors to protect the poor aircraft and its passengers from those incapable pilots'. The chief pilots and managers approved it gleefully, it gives them more power with myriads of SOPs, bulletins, new mandatory techniques (for our benefit!) and a very handy scapegoat if we don't follow them religiously.
Old farts like me say that we need to get back to real training and experience, only to realize that this is not feasible due to the sheer mass of bums needed and already on line. Even covid didn't cleanse the overcapacities that were deplored world wide, almost every government pumping billions in an unnecessary uphold of the overblown industry that helped create this problem.
We could fall back on statistics and reassure us that the accident/incident rate is still extremely low, lower than at the time of us old farts even, but it does not satisfy me. I would like a mix of self reflection by all participants. Manufacturers can do better, airline managers can do better, authorities can do better, individual pilots can do better. Mainly by not simply passing the buck to someone else, but to improve what responsibility each one bears.
This however does not absolve the responsible bodies of short term measures. They seem obvious, as there is an apparent lack of skill to overcome very simple mishaps, basically the reason we are still in the pilot seats.