Mick,
The IR said "it was a crew procedure"
To a layman this might be construed as a procedure carried out by crews.
Not so.
In that context it would have been SOP - standard operating procedures carried out by all crews.
A crew procedure, on the other hand, is an additional procedure usually additional to SOPs that may have been advised by others (Staneval etc) or in the case of a large crew such as on the Nimrod, by the crew themselves.
We used to have 'crew procedures'. We routinely carried mission mapping that other crews did not. We routinely carried out additional pre-flight checks, as we had time, that had been advised by the standards unit but which were not SOP.
It would be wrong therefore to infer that a crew procedure instituted in Sep 06 was in fact required by higher authority or indeed used by all crews.
Last edited by Pontius Navigator; 11th Nov 2007 at 14:39.
Reason: typo and confirmation by Santiago