JF, you have, as ever, hit the nail on the head.
As an airline Captain I have had to deal with the following:
* Being personally told by my Fleet Manager to defer technical effects to the last sector of the day to improve time keeping.
* Giving my First Officer a shove because he dropped off on the climb out from Heathrow.
As a First Officer I had to deal with:
* Landing (with 326 POB) off a non precision approach in the Caribbean, 2 hours 57 minutes into discretion, when my Captain claimed he was too exhausted to continue.
* Being harassed in the Flight Deck by my Fleet Manager to extend duty hours.
All of the above were safety threats. We might term them latent errors in the system. The academic importance of them would be explained by Prof. James Reason as holes in the swiss cheese that are waiting to line up and cause an accident. The job of an airline crew is to monitor the overall operation and thwart the events that might make the aforementioned holes line up.
Pilots at the sharp end fully understand this working practice. It's our survival mechanism to make sure we never leave a little back door open that could embarrass us.
This role is made a lot more difficult when you are very, very tired and working in climate of perceived fear from the management.
The problem is that the managers don't see that they have a role to play in preventing the holes in the Swiss cheese lining up. If they sweat the crews to the maximum and give discreet little hints that they want time keeping improved OR ELSE it wouldn't really enter in to their psyche that they might compound a situation such as low fuel, bad weather and wheels that don't retract on the go around at the end of the day . . .
The same minor incident can occur a hundred times without threat. However, keep operating with that ' aft fuel pump inop', factor in an inexperienced First Officer, a tired out Captain, a tricky diversion and some other random factor and you have an accident waiting to happen. THEN it becomes important that the crew should have snagged the defect and insisted it was rectified.
Of course, commercial aviation is statistically very safe these days and there hasn't been a major accident in Britain for a long time. However, a total hull loss is a frightful thing to deal with.
However, the experienced guys at the sharp end know the envirnoment has become a lot more hostile in recent years.
I don't believe there is any political will whatsoever to deal with this problem. The great British public have quite a high tolerance to risk when offered cheap flights. For ten quid well, you would go wouldn't you?
However, if some of the industries senior people could articulate the problem some progress could be made. The alternative of waiting for the evidence is insupportable to those of us in the know.
Regards,
WW
Last edited by Wig Wag; 3rd Mar 2007 at 20:21.