HarryMann;
It was Basil Fawlty with a small shrubbery in hand swiftly beating his little car that I had in mind... and the thread itself deserves nothing less.
FOQA ? Do Turkish operate such a scheme... sure it would have been mentioned * This would be one way of picking up continual approach busts, poor monitoring as well as that RA persistent failure.
If not, should ? now be thinking along the lines of enforcing such schemes in at least all European airlines above a certain size?
if there are 'cultural problem' airlines, would it not help get around that, the challenge coming from management or more dispassionate QA analysts with a stronger mandate (OK, I'll get shot for suggesting FO, SO hasn't the 'strongest mandate', so bullet proof vest on, but YUKWIM)
Yes, I know precisely what you mean and have written about here dozens of times - Flight Operations is not concerned with flight safety. It is concerned with making money. While there are tiny pockets of resistance among enlightened airlines and their managements, the flight safety department is generally found far away from the main buildings, "down the hall, to the right...etc", an untidy, under-resourced backwater, a "senate-seat" for formerly ambitious men (strangely, no women), who were unfortunate enough to pxss in the cornflakes of someone above them on the way up or they had the temerity and courage to speak the truth at corporate safety meetings and challenge others' performance and statistics as reported by safety programs doing the job of providing data.
The descent, since the sixties, of the curve showing the fatal accident rate, now at an all-time low, is about to start climbing again. The Turkish accident is merely the latest canary in the mine. Too many who lead in government and corporate offices are comfortably numb or paralyzed by present economic difficulties. SMS means someone in middle management must stick his/her head above the trench and call an operation because of a crew's "difficulties with the MEL...etc, etc" and that will be the end of that person's career advancement. You can't put someone who is responsible for the bottom line, in charge of safety processes and decisions.
FOQA at Turkish? At a number of safety conferences I have met and discussed FOQA programs with both western and eastern European airline safety representatives. While intentions of many are earnest, FOQA struggles to survive because of bean-counter ignorance and short-term thinking/planning. I spoke with no one from Turkey but given the public statements in Hurriyet ostensibly expressing denial of what really happened to their aircraft I would not be the least surprised if no FOQA Program existed at THY but I don't know. I'm sure someone will correct me if THY has a FOQA Program, (in which case I have some questions for them).
The corporate ignorance (and increasingly, government ignorance as governments get out of the safety business and hand it over to private corporations), of how the industry has achieved the excellent safety record it enjoys today, is increasing, partly due to lost history/experience, but mainly due to the new politics of safety. Such collective ignorance is tacitly granting permission to airline managements to set aside flight data programs which inconveniently show that not everything is well. This isn't just an opinion or reading about others' experience in trying to breath life into data programs.
One last thing...if we need a bullet-proof vest for raising notions such as the focus and first priority of FO, then my point is made. In my experience this is half the reason why SMS, an excellent concept, will fail in reality; no leadership, reduced to nil regulatory oversight - the FAA/Southwest/American/United events are cases in point.
These days, robust safety programs and processes take too much of the bottom line. Perhaps airline managements have set aside "corporate ethics", (an oxymoron if there ever was one), and are under the illusion that it is cheaper to buy the insurance? Regardless, for those who understand aviation and the fundamentals that keep it safe, the dynamics are clear. Fatal loss of control accidents are matching CFIT accidents - we can see it in the data. The non-fliers who don't or can't listen will end up kicking tin and settling multi-billion-dollar lawsuits for their shareholders. The story rarely varies.