Originally Posted by
BraceBrace
The money is justified if during your whole career you managed to stay away from that situation.
No, fundamentally, no. That’s your bread and butter. You're not paid for the day-to-day grind of bread and butter, you're paid for the day you have to make beef wellington without a recipe, ingredients, or a kitchen. I’ll paraphrase Sully and hope for his forgiveness; he spoke of making many tiny deposits into his bank of ability followed by one enormous withdrawal, but I see too many ‘pilots’ who don’t even possess a paying-in book.
[QUOTE=BraceBrace;12056415]
There is a balance that needs to be searched, and that balance is not based on flying skills, but on requested safety levels. We are not paid to be hero's that save the day. We are paid to avoid danger in the first place.[/QUOTE
Again, no. ‘Safety levels’ are an outcome, not an input. If, when you are called upon, your hands and feet, on your stick and rudder, can’t keep the small aluminium death tube from the crash scene, you’ve failed, and you have no right to call yourself an aviator (I make exceptions of course for those situations in which human intervention is insufficient to prevent catastrophe, and I do so with my friends Eric, Izzy, and their passengers, and those on board BND85N, and many others close to me in my thoughts).
Again and again, pilots who can’t fly kill themselves and their passengers. Sometimes there are degrees of extenuating circumstances, as in AF447, and there I apply the ‘scale of expertise’ test. I have no doubt Sully would have landed in Paris and written a defect up. I know that Dubois, Robert, and Bonin were passengers on the aircraft when it impacted; they weren’t in control. But they could have been, had their skills been adequate to the situation. Where are you on that scale,
Brace Brace ? Where was I? Where are YOU, pilot reading this thread, and what have you done to move towards the Sully end of the scale TODAY?
I’m angry about this because I have left a professional practice which I ceased to recognise, to feel part of, because I watched it decline around me. And I've walked amongst the bodies of those it killed, and shaken the hands of their relatives, and thought very long and hard, and very expertly about, ‘why’…