Sir George, Overun,
Don't just look at the lengths, look at what they are made of. And don't stop at BRS..head for the setting sun.
And please look at the stopways as well.
And I agree totally with the general proposition that CAP 168 reads well, but has been written to mean very little, in terms of clear, unequivocal guidance about what is OK and what is not. The notion that CAA seems to espouse, and blame EASA for wrongly, is that the operator must now work it out for himself (eg risk assessment etc) within very general guiidelines, and take responsibility for what he decides.
And there we get back to the retail experts and bean-counters, who don't understand what it is they are taking responsibility for. And don't much care either; corporate responsibility, in the sense of Directors being charged as criminals when people are killed because they failed in their duty of care, and jailed if found guilty, does not really exist in UK*. (See large-scale fatal rail accidents, that will go on happening until a Director, preferably Managing, is jailed for at least 3 years per life lost, when they will stop, just like that.)
(* Unless the company is very small, and the Directors are not rich and well-known. In those cases, the law is merciless, and people are jailed. Think Lyme Bay canoeing drownings, for which the absent MD was rightly jailed.
But Reginald Corbett declared that the suggestion that he should be charged with manslaughter, after 120 or so people died because of appalling management of Railtrack of which he was Chairman, was obscene. (I think that's the word he used.) The law agreed, and as a result there have been two or more similar fatal crashes since then, all due entirely to bad management by people who "take full responsibility", and carry on as before. The same is going to happen in aviation, in UK at least, unless this is changed.
Last edited by old,not bold; 1st Jun 2007 at 16:13.