Originally Posted by
Speedpig
So, when y'all do the pre-flight walk round... do you not check the tail number?
My simple mind is telling me that would be very basic airmanship.... y'all.
Did you fly for SouthWest? What a bunch of cowboys...... IMHO
This is another example of the accident promoting model of how pilots are expected to behave.
It is an unfortunate research verifiable - and verified - reality, that the number of itemised tasks that flight crew are required to do at certain times are actually beyond the capacity of any human cognitive apparatus. The threshhold can be further lowered by short turn round, fatigue, etc.
Confronted with this almost all flight crew prioritise - usually subconsciously. The first things that go to the bottom of the priority list (and therefore don't get done some of the time) are items that aren't safety or mission critical, followed by things that have never been 'wrong' in the experience of the particular pilot. It is in this latter group that Reason's 'holes in the cheese' often occur.
It is no good assuming that these sorts of errors are indicative that the person is a 'cowboy'. We all do it all the time. It's just that most of us don't fly planes full of passengers. We don't solve these problems by blaming the perpetrators if what we have asked them to do is cognitively impossible. What the industry has done is progressively use technology to provide (sometimes literally) bells and whistles, and refined procedures to bring attention to an overlooked item when safety is compromised.
But what the operational costs side of the industry does (passengers shopping for the cheapest fares and accountants looking for cost savings) is constantly force changes to the operational rules that introduce new holes in the cheese that need to be plugged.
There are, of course, cowboy individuals and cowboy operators. But before we rush to judgment we need to make the effort to identify the difference between cowboy behaviour and systemic failures that sometimes trap fully professional performers.