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Old 27th Jul 2008, 16:34
  #220 (permalink)  
rubik101
 
Join Date: Jul 2000
Location: Thailand
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PJ2, you would do well to try and find someone in BA who deals with their system. It was the first airline in the UK around 15 to 20 years ago to introduce such a system and has been very well tried and tested. BALPA (The pilot's Union) and the BA Pilot's Council were heavily involved with the introduction of the system, as you might imagine when a pioneering system is about to be thrust upon the pilot community in BA. I think you will be able to find the history of the introduction as it was all well documented and quite public.

When the equipment was first installed on the whole fleet in our company, the data was collected and analyzed but no actions taken until the whole system was thoroughly checked over a period of many months.

Once education, instruction and information were given to the pilots the rates of such things as late configuration, ILS deviations, speed deviations, flap speed exceedances and many others, fell quite dramatically, some by a factor of 20 or more!

Further experience and settling of the system over the past few years has seen events reduce to a consistently below industry average. Incidentally, ICAO is provided with the data collected in a graphical format, with no identification, simply to provide operators with a comparison to the industry averages. They also have data on such things as bird strikes, TCAS events, level busts and many others.

The company that collects the data in our case is an independent company who analyse data from several airlines. Most of the analysts are ex pilots, ex mainly through loss of license on medical grounds.

The facilitators at each base tend to be Captains who have been with the company some time. They are not always Training Captains, though some are.

The benefits of such a system in the interests of flight safety cannot be over-emphasised.

If you have any influence within your company then you would be well advised to push for the introduction of a comprehensive and complete system. The benefits might never be seen in the happy and ideal case that your company never has an accident. However, what such a system will most certainly do is to increase conformity to SOPs, hence raising safety standards within the company and a marked reduction in the events that might be seen as 'dangerous' by a very wide margin.

I commend the system to the house.
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