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Old 7th Oct 2004, 05:33
  #59 (permalink)  
MOR
 
Join Date: Feb 2000
Location: Euroland
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Woomera

Do you want to have a go? I think it would be a cracker??
Oh no, you mean you want me to THINK...???

Rongotai

With the greatest possible respect, and respecting your rights as an individual, and with the exercise of the greatest possible restraint... I'm not entirely sure you understand the aviation industry very well. I suspect your ideas come from a different industry, with different priorities.

Firstly, the object of incident/accident investigations is to find out what happened. What is later done with this information, is another matter - and that is what is determined by the airline culture.

Now the investigation process is aided by two vital bits of equipment, the Cockpit Voice Recorder and the Flight Data Recorder. This removes the possibility of either avoiding the icy finger of blame, or lying, in the majority of cases. I am sure that the CVR will be quite revealing in this case... probably a few uncertain exchanges followed by "oh sh*t".

Almost ever reasonably serious incident or accident is officially investigated by the CAA. In almost all other cases, the airline will carry out an internal investigation, the scope of which is determined by their procedures, which are themselves part of the Operations Manual and therefore approved by the CAA (in other words, they are essentially law). For this reason, an airline internal investigation should first of all try and determine what happened.

In more minor cases where a formal investigation may not take place, the apportioning of blame is very straightforward - the Captain is in command at all times, and the buck stops with him or her. Of course that also applies where there is a formal investigation. If the Captain did not actually cause the incident, he or she can be considered to be at fault for not adequately monitoring the other pilot - harsh, some may say, but that is how a command gradient works.

For this reason, one of the more attractive aspects of union membership is the legal protection you get!

There are several ways in which pilots can confidentially admit to errors - most aviation authorities sponsor these. CHIRP in the UK is one example. So that answers your "current judgement".

Secondly, don't mistake the microcosm of NZ aviation for what happens in the rest of civilisation - we are behind the curve in many ways when it comes to Human Factors - in fact, woefully so in some areas. Coming back after 20 years away, that much was painfully obvious!

Oh, and by the way, there are cowboys in all airlines, the selection procedures are not as reliable as you think they are (don't get me started on that one!), and line checks in many airlines can be pretty casual. Simulator checks are generally a lot tougher.

Finally, say what you like about LCC's but, in Europe in any case, they spend a lot on training. MUCH more than they need to.
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