One of the hazards of free speech and the desire to help wanabees / self improvers in an open forum is that you often have to suffer some extreme and/or inaccurate views. These can and must be countered with strong moderation and accurate, professional responses; well done Danny et al, maintain the strong moderating stance.
We need to put professionalism back into Pprune. This forum is a valuable industry resource which has to endure the ravages of media – we have to educate them as much as ourselves, and as well, provide a well balanced public view. This requires professionals to lead by example with disciplined thought and communication – aspects of the day job, which hopefully the less informed or ill disciplined observer can learn from. After all, it is public perception that ultimately decides the fate of our industry, and if we do grossly mismanage our flights it is the members of the public that will form the jury.
As for the incident; the crew judged the situation on the information (including rules and procedures) available to them at that time.
[Definition: 8th grade comprehension] A judgement is a decision based on facts. Some facts are valid or true, some are not. To be valid, a judgment must be reasonable, but not necessarily the only decision. Many judgements are based on the same facts, but not all of them are valid.
Many posters are attempting to judge the incident, but not in the same time scale, nor with the same facts as the crew had. This behaviour is typically influenced by hindsight bias. Similarly the apportioning of ‘error’, a form of blame, can only be made after the incident has occurred. No crew sets out to deliberately make an error; yet in hindsight, human nature seeks error or blame as a means of achieving improvement.
The industry must celebrate the successes, irrespective of the apparent facts and circumstances. The crew made a decision, continually rechecked and evaluated options as the flight progressed and, when required, took another appropriate decision that maintained the required level of safety. These are the issues that should be highlighted; we require rational and well considered discussion to see how best these can be translated into ‘experience’ that all of us can retain and use if and when appropriate.
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