Oh dear!
Beag’s your post (20 July) reflects the best and worst of the issues that currently plague our industry.
At best you engage the subject and express the incredulity of this accident; at worst you perhaps exhibit denial, and circum to errors of personal assessment.
Whether you like it or not, you and I are history. I suspect that we had similar, if not identical training. You twirled your 4 jets or provided airborne refreshment while I made fruitless efforts to intercept, and latterly was thankful for a top up every 20mins.
In our time the training was exceptional – in places it still is; I have spent many hours trying to understand what it was, capture those special components which provided discipline, awareness, and judgement for so many situations. Other pilots may not be so fortunate; they are not given the length or quality of our training, nor the opportunity for extensive and meaningful experiences. They, all of us to some degree, now suffer the constraints of modern commercial pressures.
I am sure that even the tiniest bit of self reflection would enable you to identify precursor situations in your career which could have developed into something just as serious as happened with the C5 (good ‘war stories’). What was the ‘special’ item from your training that closed the hole in the ‘Swiss Cheese’; or was it one of your crew that prevented all of the components of an impending accident from coming together. Then an analysis could consider contributions (or lack of) up the chain of command, facilities, personal support, safety culture, etc.
I won’t argue the point that ‘it’ wouldn’t happen to you, but I wouldn’t bet on it, particularly with my own life. You, like many other less experienced pilots, apparently fail to accept the human vulnerability to error. If it is not going to be your error then it will probably be someone else’s.
Alternatively, with acceptance of error what gems can you pass on to others? Instead of stating what you see as obvious, “
Because the training I received, and later delivered, made damn sure that a higher level of professionalism was invariably displayed than by that bunch in the C-5”, please pass on this ‘wisdom’ and help us all to move towards that higher level of professionalism which aviation requires.
You will recall that:-
We do not plan or decide to commit errors.
Errors do not cause accidents - it is our failure to identify them with time to act.
Errors are only determined after an event, they are ‘labels’ - symptoms of the situation.
Errors are there to be used, to be learnt from; they are an essential ingredient of the professionalism that we all seek.
For those looking for something more positive from this discussion, try some Reason; CRM with a photocopier.