Centaurus ‘A fine ideal but not realistic’
Achieving an ideal is always difficult, but we need ideals; they are an aim – the objective of improving safety. Without ideals then you may as well accept the status quo in those countries / operators who appear to be ‘less safe’ when judged by our ideals.
One question that this line of thought raises is whether our ideals should be applied to those countries / operators. We should ask if our ‘ideal’ operating / training methods are suitable for their culture – why is our way the best, will our way ever work ‘over there’.
Which is the dominant culture in this thread and what type of culture is depicted?
theamrad ‘then to hell with their perceptions’
Surely a problem with culture is that it inbreeds perception as subconscious bias. These biases, shame – loss of face, are part of a way of life, education, business, etc.
If we take the view that ‘their’ culture is not capable of significant change – meeting ‘our’ ideals, then the alternative is to provide defences elsewhere. As Prof Reason indicates, safety problems originate in the organisation, and changes there can protect operators from themselves – from their culture.
If the problem is P1 dominance, (P1 not receptive, P2 not assertive, or both P1/P2 in error); then a solution could be to design an aircraft that is able to protect the crew from hazardous activity emanating from their culture. In this sense the Airbus philosophy has great merit, particularly where the P1 problem can occur in any culture.
An alternative solution is to put the functional excellence of P2 – the crosscheck/monitor and alerting functions, into a box. Humans tend to respect a computed output more than another human, particularly where the commuter provides a solution to the error. However, even this has human problems as seen with crews ignoring GPWS and more recently EGPWS. The natural progression would be to automate, to remove the human of whatever culture / error prone disposition, from the flying / decision loop. Automatic EGPWS, ACAS, and windshear manoeuvring is possible, but might face some professional culture issues before acceptance.
Clearly, in the immediate future, automation or use of alerting technology cannot provide the ideal that the industry seeks; thus back to Centaurus / the top of my post – achieving the ideal is difficult.
For a change we could try to see the problem from ‘their’ perspective. Is there anything within their culture that could be used to improve safety – how can flying a GA be presented as something of honour, to be sought, to be rewarded?
But we still strive for this in our culture; we have CRM and we have overruns. So what is the difference – Burbank, Toronto, Midway, – the number of fatalities !!
Many of the contributing factors in these accidents were organisational, thus in whichever culture we reside or from whichever viewpoint we take, perhaps organisational changes should be explored in parallel with those aimed at the end user; look higher up in the organisation (Operator / Regulator / Government) so that change will address the poor overall safety levels indicated in the statistics. But equally, and yet again as presented by Prof Reason, don’t let the pendulum swing too far towards the organisation; individuals (pilots) must hold some accountability.
shortfinals there is no truth in statistics – in front or behind them, only a viewpoint; it is the alternative viewpoints that are important.