Some people’s desire to take joy in the prospect of failure, even lust after it…frightens me.
Everything we fly, the aircraft, the engines, the airlines, the air-routes, came because someone put on their rose coloured glasses for just long enough to say “why not”.
I’ve been a captain for 20 years and every time I see a slush covered runway, and a 15 hour flight ahead, with crummy en-route alternates to some over-stretched and under equipped US mega-hub….I can think of 20 reasons not to go. Yet, balancing it all, I go. I just don’t see unending cynicism as being part of the required mindset for an airline pilot.
I’m glad, some days, that PPrune didn’t exist when Reg Ansett was getting started, or Hudson Fysh at Qantas, or Lester Brain at TAA, or the guys who started ETOPS with the 757s…or the folks who put together the first Airbus A300 (against the “might” of Boeing, Douglas and Lockheed) ……they’d have NEVER started. And at what cost?
Mr. Stoddart may well be a rich egotistical knave, but if rejecting such folk was ever made a retrospective filter in our industry there’d be few airlines, few airlines and, dare I say it, few pilots!