Command Failure Rates
I often read about the high failure rates of initial Captain Candidates at Cathay on this forum. In order to provoke thought on this subject, I spoke with the FAA Principal Operating Inspector (POI) at the major airline I work for some insight.
In North America, a failure rate at a major airline is considered excessively high if it exceeds 15% of first time Captain upgrade candidates. It was not made clear to me over what time frame this 15% represents but the Director of Training indicated that it was less than a single quarter in its fiscal year. As a result, the FAA would conduct an investigation into the airline's training program. Any deficiencies or additions would then be instituted into the program to bring the failure rate below the 15%. The program would not necessarily be any easier; rather it would be more conducive to a better learning experience yet still fiscally sensitive to the airline. This type of program has been in place since the early 1990's.
With this in mind, I have a couple of comments and questions about what I am hearing about Cathay training. If you have a First Officer who has been through numerous checking events over the course of nearly a decade with Cathay, how can Cathay justify the high failure rate of initial Captain's? Have they really been unsafe over all those years as a co-pilot that would warrant them incapable of being a Captain? Is there any REAL oversight by a regulatory agency in Hong Kong to monitor abnormally high failure rates or do they even care? Is there any grievance procedure in place if a Captain candidate felt that they were being discriminated against?
60-80% of all accidents occurs as a result of poor group-decision making, ineffective communication, inadequate leadership and poor task management and has little to do with the technical aspects of operating in a multi-person cockpit or ATC operations area. In 1986 ICAO adapted a resolution that "In order to improve safety, OPERATORS must be made aware and RESPONSIVE to the importance of human factors in aviation through PROACTIVE learning and from the REACTION of others."
My point with this quoted comment from ICAO and from my personal experience as a Check Airmen is that failure rates are not entirely indicative of ill prepared candidates (as I so often read on Fragrant Harbor forum), but rather a reflection of a poorly constructed training environment. Is Cathay creating better Captains because they can recite from memory a dogmatic passage from an operations or systems manual? If simple mistakes in the training environment have consequences later in your career what kind of environment do you think that creates? Preventing candidates from communicating well for fear of retribution creates a potential accident scenario. Is Cathay really any safer than any other major airline? Why is Cathay culture like this? Why does it permeate into the training department?
My airline also has a hostile employer/management relationship but that is curiously completely absent in the training environment. Smarter people before me realized that our lives and families are worth more than petty politics. And so are yours.