Originally Posted by
patrickal
This is true in any profession requires a heightened sense of awareness at all times. It can be part of work dissatisfaction, fatique, boredem, etc., but they are all just a part of a bigger problem. The key to success is to keep a "culture of discipline" alive and active at all times. This means having some sort of process, or triggers in your process, that constantly bring you head back into the game and make sure you are not missing anything. This is probably easier to do in a military environment (although you still wind up with things like the C5/Dover Delaware incident), but much harder to maintain in a commercial environment. It requires committment from both management AND crews, along with the unions. It has to be self policing, and in short, MUST become part of the culture. These guys were no different than anyone else doing there job in any profession. They were 75% in the game, talking about things that were not important, and not catching the clues around them that were screaming at them.
I have worked with professional organizations for almost 30 years, at both consulting and management levels, and although I am not a pilot, I do know that you cannot change inherent problems if you do not change the culture. This transcript screams of a cultural problem. You can wish that it were not so, or vehemently disagree, but that's what it is, and EVERYONE has to commit to fix it.
Patrick
This is one of the most insightful posts that I have seen on this board. Everybody should read it a couple of times!
I am a practicing physician as well as a pilot. This post could be talking about the world of medicine as easy as the world of professional aviation.