BOAC;
Since the institutional rout of the airline pilot profession began some years ago and was ramped up in earnest after 9/11, the heretofore inherent respect and attendant remuneration and benefits of the career have been cut away to bare bones.
Today, training days are unpaid days at most major carriers. Simulator training including bi-annual checks and licence renewals are done on days' off, as are any annual recurrent briefing days. I know for a fact that training footprints are under extreme beancounter pressure, literally with a clipboard-holder peering over shoulders at times, watching for unnecessary costs being incurred.
Add to that, the "desecration" if you will, of the profession by airline managements bent upon "breaking" the profession's (perceived) "stronghold" on an airline's pursestrings through traditionally "high" salaries accompanied by a perceived professional arrogance - all prime targets for wet-behind-the-ears MBA's fresh out of school with no notion of how aviation works and absolutely no concept whatsoever of the principles of flight safety, (never taught to airline executives) but lots of drive to prove oneself by impressing upper management with big ideas on how to reduce costs and play to the shareholders.
The result is, as friends of mine who are in the recruiting and training business have observed, candidates with the ability, drive and intelligence are taking a look at the profession, it's potential, the relative lack of job security and most of all the way it has been treated by managements of all major carriers and they are, by and large, selecting other less onerous professions in which to grow and prosper.
Certainly, most choose aviation out of love of flying and not the pay and benefits (notwithstanding being away for almost all important family days, etc...) but a pilot used to be able to house, cloth, feed and educate a family at least. When the salary for an experienced First Officer on an Embraer or Bombardier, a candidate who has already spent perhaps a decade in the field with at least 5000hrs and spent about $100,000 in university and flight training costs, gets to fly right seat for $37,000/year if that, while classmates with less time in find professions paying $100,000 within years of starting (typically in business, law or dentistry etc), then managements can expect that such candidates will become fewer and perhaps even of lesser quality while those who would have made fine pilots simply give the profession a miss and go elsewhere. These are not pure industrial issues which may be dismissed under the semi-darwinian notion of "you get what you negotiate" - there are far larger, more fundamental issues at stake for the profession.
To me it is a long-term flight safety issue that is unfolding here, and, along with other aspects of the industry which we can all see, some of which is mentioned here, may in time, actually reverse the spectacular reductions in accident rates which have thus far been accomplished by very good if not dedicated work by flight safety professionals.
The trends will take some time, perhaps decades, to build into a pattern and by then these original infrastructure issues will be "invisible" to managements because change occurs so fast today that institutional history and knowledge of the past is non-existent within an airline and "original causes" will have disappeared down the memory hole. An increasing accident rate will be a mystery to anyone without this historical understanding.
The other very significant pattern is the de-regulation of safety oversight itself. There will always be human-factors accidents. What is driving compromise and what, in my view, will change the accident-rate trends is the "Cost-control" mantra which governments increasingly face and which are being solved by "getting out of the regulatory business". Safety Management Systems is a concept which downloads such oversight responsibilities onto the operators.
We are at that precise junction at this moment (the fork in the road, if you will), and are starting down the pathway to reduced oversight, individual airline audit programs which will be audited themselves by the regulator...in short, a for-profit business is being asked to self-regulate and monitor it's own incidents and flight safety efforts all the while maintaining a "healthy" enterprise driven solely by production pressures. In an enterprise where there is disagreement between flight safety professionals and the "Suits", the outcome will almost always end up with commercial pressures dominating.
In such a scenario, preventative safety strategies such as FOQA and ASR programs which are designed as pre-emptive programs, will suffer support and struggle for resources because they are not "profitable" and cannot "demonstrate income". Such pressures may provide fertile ground for a "Reversion to ignorance" in terms of eschewing preventative strategies while favouring the less-onerous, and used-only-when-needed investigative strategies. Such approaches only prevent the second accident however - all we need do is examine the present situation in Brazil for proof that this approach is alive and well.
So long as the flying public is tolerant and quickly-forgetful of the horrors of last week's accident, aviation enterprises will take the cheap way out, while doing just enough to tick the box and avoid the worst of any criticism including the attention of the regulators. Manufacturers have done remarkably well in assisting the landmark increase in flight safety through technologies such as digital radar, reliable engines, INS>IRS>GPS-navigation technologies, GPWS > EGPWS, TCASII and so on, all of which have added to the bottom line of the operators who have embraced such technologies. But the human aspect remains in all forms. Managements long-intoxicated with automation and miriad tech-solutions make the fundamental error that "computers" will look after everything and that investment in difficult-to-justify human "resources" continues to be difficult to justify to those who see, and seek the bottom line.
The two factors mentioned here are related. It will be interesting to see how the next decade or so unfolds and how these factors are handled.
To me, the rest of the story is details within these larger forces now well-ensconced within our industry. Only time will tell us if we have resisted sufficiently as a profession.