A great question Raw Data, and one which I'm not sure wasn't a leading one.
In a past life I was a P3 driver: hence my nick; and while I can't say that I was in the 'natural' category, I did see enough of them around the traps to be able to try and model my command style on them.
I also saw a few Grey-boat skippers in action, and admired the way they were successfully able to delegate authority for action without losing overall command of the situation. All the ships I saw had a 'Captain's chair' from which the Captain would command his vessel: but from that chair he couldn't reach the helm or fire the ship's missiles or gun - he had a crew to do that: all he had to do was say so.
For the 'real-worlders' among us, the P3 is one of a small class of warfighting aircraft with a crew spanning more than one hand, or even two. Within that large complement rest a variety of personality types, personal motivations and circumstances. Given the overarching requirement to get the job done with the available resources, I firmly believe that we had to practise CRM in its full
crew manifestation long before the rest of the aviation world had caught on - and no, I'm not gloating: as I said before, I'm no 'natural'.
What relevance to current discussion? It is my personal feeling that the command skills I learnt in my single-seat training do need a great deal of adaptation to a modern commercial cockpit. It is unfortunate, perhaps, that most if not all of my collegues share at least a little of my 'traditional' aviation background, even if they're from a GA or instructional background.
Where I'm coming from is that, given the proliferation of threats to flight safety which originate from outside the 'traditional' aviation environment - be they from customer service agents, corporate HR or wherever - perhaps the personality or behavioural type that needs to be cultivated in the modern aircraft commander is also somewhat distant from our traditional 'aviation' type.
We would, I think, identify with some moments of Top Gun, or Blackadderself - all good for a laugh; but I'd like to offer for the forum's consideration of CRM two other TV shows - both named Star Trek.
On my recurrent CRM days, which my airline to its credit conducts as a combined Tech/Cabin extravaganza, I highlight the difference in leadership and management styles between Captains Kirk and Picard, and ask with which one of the two the coursemembers would prefer to serve. The answer is unanimous; and with good reason.
From my perspective, Picard seems to implement those elements of successful command which I have seen in real life in the Grey-boat commanders, and in the 'naturals': namely the ability to exercise directive control while maintaining the big picture. Jean-Luc is not your 'root-em, shoot-em' type of commander that I feel much initial pilot training ends up breeding.
I do feel that the increasingly complex yet automated environment in which we work establishes an intellectual distance from the detail of the task at hand, but too often the measures put in place by airlines to address this issue are misguided, and attempt to remedy that distance in an effort to mitigate potential consequences, rather than accepting that the paradigm has changed, and that so must a commander's skill set.
Perhaps an example will illustrate that convoluted paragraph. We are all familiar with RNAV systems which incorporate their own error-trapping algorithms. These systems are sufficiently accurate that we can use them as sole means of navigation within particular pieces of airspace. Nevertheless, my airline still insists on conducting
repeated checks of the system against raw data rather than an initial serviceability check against that raw data and thence monitoring the integrity of system's errortrapping.
What I'm trying to get at is that, irrespective of finer points of the navigation question, it seems apparent that the two approaches demand different operational mindsets and, in the event of things going awry, different error-trapping methodologies and command skills.
In summary, I believe that the Grey-boat-, Picard-type approach of oversight but not involvement is extemely applicable to today's and tomorrow's cockpits: it's just that we weren't brought up that way.
It's late over here and I'm off to bed. I'd like to be able to tie that all together a little better, but perhaps someone else will do that for me.
Best regards
FP