Woomera/MOR
Your latest interchage brings the discussion to the point that I think is most significant.
We design safety enhancing processes that are designed around some abstract and idealised propositions such as:
The captain has the ultimate responsibility and is in command
The FO will challenge the captain when he doesn't follow the manual
We will put our mistakes on the table for discussion so we can all learn from them
... and these get operationalised in real life situations such as....
Here is an Asian airline flight deck with an expat captain and a local FO, and they both have the worst possible general attitudes towards each other
This captain has ways of humiliating FOs who piss him off
The company screams for blood if anyone makes a mistake
The most global of these is the fiction that the flight crew can make safety stimulated decisions that have commerical consequences for their employers without there being any personal penalty, and that even if there were personal penalties flight crew will always put safety considerations above everything else when making operational decisions.
In my view we have got to the point in technology and personnel training where in the future large investments will produce small safety gains. I believe that we will find the best future safety gains by concentrating on the socio part of socio-technical systems, on organisational and flight deck cultures, and on management practices. And I further believe that one of the best ways to do this is to do a better of job openly discussing the operational implications of the inevitability of safety-commercial trade offs, and to stop pretending that flight crews are TRULY totally in charge of whether the flight goes or stays in all circumstances.