A GOOD READ FROM ANOTHER FORUM...
"This goes beyond the lack of common sense on an individual crew member's part, though I am sure it will be shown there was a remarkable absence of that in this incident.
We can afford to just roll our eyes over lack of common sense when we are dealing with jeepney or taxi drivers. Nobody spends millions of pesos to train jeepney or taxi drivers in multimillion dollar simulators. Jeepney and taxi drivers do not sit through hours of CRM (Car Resource Management) classes. Jeepney and taxi drivers are not asked to gather thousands of hours of driving experience before being allowed to take the wheel of a public utility vehicle. Jeepney and taxi drivers are certainly not paid over a hundred thousand pesos a month to do their thing. And jeepney and taxi drivers certainly cannot wreak as much potential damage and carnage as an erring flight crew.
The flying public expects a highly-trained flight deck crew, with thousands of hours of flight experience each, to at least recognize a dangerous situation developing and act correctly.
Let's go to the Tacloban incident for the moment. Tonet has written about the space-shuttle approach profile. But beyond the terrible airmanship displayed by the pilot there was a severe breakdown of CRM (Crew Resource Management).
Granting that one crew member was acting irrationally, that he had shorted between the ears. Or he was smug and overconfident of his ability to pull the landing off. Or he was just having a bad day.
Yet there was another crew member onboard who must have--should have--recognized that his colleague's actions were placing the aircraft and its passengers in jeopardy. That same crewmember should have acted to prevent the inevitable conclusion.
Yet it seemed the other crew member sat back passively and allowed things to unravel. It did not seem he was
empowered to act. He was so cowed by his captain's seniority and the prospect of being "endorsed" he chose to reduce himself to spectator status instead.
("Endorsed" is a PAL term for being given hell and treated like pariah by other pilots upon the say-so of another pilot. They actually have a term for it!)
What is inexcusable on the part of the airline is if the Butuan accident turns out to be a carbon copy of the Tacloban overshoot incident only seven months prior.
In Tacloban, injuries were minor and the airplane flew again (after a few million dollars' worth of repairs). No harm done, not even to the owner's substantial pockets. Did this make the airline think that everything was hunky-dory and that the Tacloban overshoot was an unlucky, but isolated incident?
Every incident or accident, no matter how insubstantial the damage or injuries, should be occasion for soul-searching on the part of airline management. Questions should have been raised as to why the crew forced the landing despite all parameters for a safe approach and landing laid down in black-and-white in their BOMs not being met. Then measures should've been taken to prevent a repeat.
This was clearly not done.
Even if it will be shown that there was a breakdown in CRM, and even if the airline acknowledges the fact, they will never address the root cause of the problem if they do not acknowledge it to be a failure of corporate culture, a corporate culture that institutionalizes practices like being "endorsed" and "wait 'til".
No amount of sitting through CRM classes at PLC, or holding hands and singing "Kumbaya" will ever make the flight deck more conducive to exercising proper CRM unless the entire company, from management to the senior pilots on down to the most junior flight deck crewmembers, pays more than just lip service to the concept.
If a first officer succeeds in calling the attention of his captain to an impending altitude bust or a developing CFIT, that is just one step to successful CRM.
If that captain subsequently "endorses" that first officer, and the first officer is given a hard time over contradicting his captain, then the concept of CRM
en toto has failed. In tolerating a system of punishing assertiveness on the flight deck, the very heart of CRM, the company has failed the flying public.
In the 90's, Korean Airlines and China Airlines both suffered a string of fatal crashes. Each crash was attributed to a breakdown in CRM rooted in the peculiar Asian concept of "losing face". First officers were afraid to contradict their captains because the latter might lose face. Well, they all literally did that in the ensuing crash.
The difference between those KE and CI crashes and the Tacloban
PR incident is not that there were fatalities, but that the first two airlines actually acted on them. Expat pilots (who do not "lose face" easily) were brought in and CRM initiatives were instituted. It took several hundred charred bodies, but they acted on them.
No charred bodies here, but should we be waiting for them?"