Schibulsky
You are, I must admit, amazing. You are the gift that keeps on giving. You keep giving me opportunity after opportunity.
To you it is about “baiting”. You seem to think that I don’t give you credit for your background and experience. I just figured that this is your usual way of expressing yourself, not that you had no background or experience. When I say that I admire and respect your background, I actually mean it. But you don’t seem capable of figuring that out. And the “baiting” thing, it strikes me as a bit of schadenfreude. But it shows two things. One, that you are more than willing to falsify something as a “tactic” to try to “win” an argument, and that two, if that is the case, then the argument itself you are making must be weak. When you falsify something intentionally, it affects your credibility on everything else that you say. And I can get a joke. In fact some would say that I have a decent sense of humor. I do get a chuckle every time I see one of your responses. You also seem to think that this whole discussion is about who “wins” and that it must be you, so you look good to your friends. To me it is not about that. It is about whether or not the European system of operational control/dispatch is a safe system, or more accurately, could it be made safer? To me the answer is clearly yes. To you, it seems not.
You make some pretty wild claims. In effect, that in the future in Europe the pilot’s associations and the airlines will require additional licensing. Show me where the European Cockpit Association has ever supported licensing for dispatchers. I am not aware of any such support. Show me where the Association of European Airlines has ever advocated Flight Dispatcher licensing? I can assure you that they have not.
The direction in some places is going in the opposite direction .For example, the Swedish CAA are actually looking at eliminating the flight dispatcher license. Countries are moving away from their own CAA requirements and more towards JAA/EASA, which have no licensing, training or flight watch.
You are correct about the LBA license in Germany. It is well respected and some would say superior to the FAA license. But you don’t talk about the rest of the package. Europe is a patchwork regarding flight dispatch licensing. Some countries, such as Germany, Austria, Denmark, and Iceland, etc do require licensing. But few or none of them actually require a positive flight watch on all transport flights, whether short or long haul. And you leave out two of the big ones. France and the UK have absolutely no licensing requirement whatsoever. And they are very significant.
You talk about what an LBA dispatcher would have done with Maersk. But Maersk wasn’t a German operation in any way. And you talk about getting the weather. But you fail to state how it would be delivered to the aircraft enroute. Many carriers in Europe don’t even have ACARS, or a VHF system of communication for enroute information by the air carrier to the crew. They depend on ATC. That is what happened with Maersk. That is also what happened with Swiss in Berlin, when they crashed there in bad weather, running out of fuel. No ACARS and no flight watch/monitoring system.
You say that “all the established airlines have a monitoring system implemented”. That is simply not true. I have been to a number of European Ops/Dispatch Offices, and the vast majority of them that I have seen are basically flight planning functions. Those that do have a “monitoring” system usually have no one actually assigned to tell the crew anything or warn them and it is not a focus for them. There are a few that have good systems, (KLM comes to mind as an excellent one), but most do not. I don’t believe that any of the large LCC carriers such as Ryanair and Easyjet have flight watch either, and they have become a high percentage of operations. They are certainly “established “ now.
Even with the German system, all of the finest training and licensing in the world won’t plug the hole. You must know about Hapag Lloyd and the A310 that ran out of fuel and crashed at Vienna, destroying the aircraft? That was a German carrier. And before you go and blame it all on the crew, which is easy to do, let me explain another part of the story. The crew on that flight not only made a poor judgment to continue with the gear locked down past a number of good airports (Zagreb, for example) and ran out of fuel in the air, they also used the wrong gear down airspeed, of 270K IAS instead of 240K which used more fuel. In the US there was an exact parallel, where an A300 also had the gear locked down after takeoff, and after consulting with the dispatcher, continued on toward the destination with the gear down. But they had agreed to check with the dispatcher half way to the destination to see how they were doing. They did and they were using more fuel, but the dispatcher found that they also were using the wrong speed, and advised them to slow down. They did, the fuel consumption reduced, and the flight made it to its destination with reserve fuel. Also, the US dispatcher could have told the crew that they must land earlier, and could not continue. Everything that the US crew did was agreed to and checked by the dispatcher the whole way, but he could have stopped the flight in the event that it would be unsafe to continue. Hapag Lloyd never had that kind of support. They made a number of errors. And they crashed. And the German Captain was criminally prosecuted. The US crew flew the next day as normal. The US system requires licensing and training of dispatchers, ground to air communications systems with the flight for the entire route, a positive flight watch/monitoring system and joint responsibility between the Captain and the Dispatcher. No European system has this. But a number of others have adopted it, including the Chinese.
You make fun of the Chinese toy problems and recalls. Brilliant move. I got a kick out of it. But you failed to note something. We are comparing airline operational control systems, not toys. And, since the Chinese have adopted the US system, I can’t think of any of their aircraft that have run out fuel and crashed. But European flights have. And that is not a joke.
But I do have a joke for you.
Yadda yadda is not an argument.
Best Regards
Kellmark
Boredcounter;
Happy to. Just check my profile and e-mail me.