CHIRP, which stands for Confidential Human Incident Reporting Procedure only officially opened its doors for Cabin Crew reports a few months back, although knowing the nature of the beast such reports would ALWAYS have been welcome and acted upon, IMHO.
For those who have never heard of this scheme, it is an entirely seperate body from the airlines and regulators, set up as a charitable trust, who receive, publish and recommend action based on reports from aviation personnel. Most of the reports come from Pilots, ATC and Engineers. These reports are often of events which have not lead to an incident, but had the strong potential to do so, and were not reported to the company or authority for any number of reasons (of which fear for job security is a common one.)
I would strongly recommend everyone involved in aviation to have a working knowledge of how CHIRP operates, and the confidence to use its system whenever you feel there is a safety issue which may not receive proper treatment from your company, or may in some way incriminate you... with CHIRP, you can tell the world what went wrong, helping your colleagues to avoid a repetition of the incident, or alternatively highlight unsafe work practices without fear of comeback.
They are on the web now at
CHIRP. Visit the site, and PSR777's question will be answered, as there are a few CC reports on there. Remember, it's only been a couple of months since CC were officially included, hence the low number.
Personally, I feel the presence of CHIRP on the web is a double-edged sword. In favour, it allows wider dissemination of reports, and therefore increases the chance of prevention. Against, it allows non aviation people who work for the lowest of the low gutter press (The Daily Mail, in particular) to use the issues out of context and write ill-informed articles which do nothing to further aviation safety, but merely fill a sensational column in their rag, thus discouraging further reporting. However, they'd probably always have got hold of the paper version anyway....
That, however is the price we pay in this information-led society. CHIRP is invaluable, and a credit to those who set it up in the first place.
£6
[ 20 August 2001: Message edited by: Sick Squid ]