Iberia IB6166, BOS-MAD, 2nd Dec, Cowboys !!!!

[DK_FCI]

I don’t know what happened at KBOS, I wasn’t there.

But I know that nothing good ever comes out of a blame culture, and this seems to be a very bad example of a blame culture. Everyone pure and white, washing their hands at sink. Blame cultures only lead to the real reasons behind the incidents being hidden, by placing all the responsibility on the individual, without trying to understand why he acted like he did. People rarely deliberately make unsafe decisions, more often it’s the system that they are in that causes them to do so. What pressures were the crew subjected to, didn’t he know better and so on.

Read Sidney Dekker’s The Field Guide to Understanding Human Error – a very good book about how you should go about trying to understand why pilots did what they did.

He talks about getting into the tunnel with the “incident” crew, and trying to understand why the actions they took made sense to them at the time.
Once you understand why they did what they did, you are very close to understanding the real cause.

Does anyone here know why the Iberia crew felt it was the right thing to do?

Neither do I!

I see it like this this:

No one in their right mind would depart with snow on their wings – but they apparently did.

So there must have been some strong forces at play here, and we need to understand what they were, if we want to become better pilots.

Just calling them Cowboys – that is just so old school – and will do us no good, maybe with the exception of making us feel better than them, and we probably are'nt.