Spanair accident at Madrid

[justme69]

While I personally think that it's not easy at all to "catch" pilot's bad behavior, specially if it is only sporadic, I'm all for forcing airlines to install voice/image recording devices in the cockpits that last longer than the 32 minutes of the CVR which, best case scenario, would only allow to evaluate pilot's behavior for the landing part of the last flight.

That way airline supervisors can figure out what goes on behind the locked doors of the cockpit and catch bad apples before their actions becames a danger. Don't we all agree that this would be an easy, cheap and really effective way to monitor progress and compliance of crews with training?

After all, the last 8 large accidents with victims in the US have all been due to human error. This was Spain's worst accident in a long time, the first one with victims in Madrid in 25 years and the first one for Spanair in 20. Over 65% of aviation accidents are due to human error as the primary cause.

In that case, those within the company in charge of supervising could also be held responsables for repeated risky conducts of the pilots under their supervision/training.

It looks a bit like "who watches the watchman" to me, though.

So a pilot (consistenly, lets make this easy) fails to do his job as trained and the person that hired/trained him is to blame. Therefore, they failed too and all "four" go to jail. And it's OK to end it there. We don't need to hire someone to supervise that the supervisor is actually supervising the pilot, or that the trainer is actually properly training the pilots.

And if we establish such a position in an airline, then when a pilot fails, we send to jail also the supervisor for failing to catch him and the supervisor of the supervisor for failing to notice that the supervisor that failed to catch the pilot wasn't doing his job correctly.

I'm all for that too.

But why stop there? I would put a smiley face if the matter wasn't serious.

While I would totally understand the chief pilot/chief of operations/training of Spanair being charged by a judge if he never allowed the pilots to know how to properly deploy the flaps and how to follow the checklist, or if he had knowledge that they weren't routinely following the proper procedures, I don't see how he can be responsable if he never found an indication of that being the case and the training included more than sufficient information on the importance and proper procedures of flaps deployment.