In this business, anybody who would knowingly succumb to pressure and sign off a blatantly unsafe item is the rare exception rather than the rule.
PJ2 is absolutely spot on though. Commercial pressures are overcoming safety concerns in the backrooms and boardrooms and SMS is expanding this normalization of deviance at a head spinning pace. It's not so obvious at ground level when a single job card or MEL is signed off or an aircraft is dispatched, but at 10,000 ft the view is a whole lot different.
For all of you who say Ian's concerns are baseless, you really need to take a step back and get some perspective.
The big boss says safety is job 1 but his bonus is based on raising profits. Those profits come from increased revenues and lowered costs. He then put's like minded folks in all the senior decision making roles. From what I've seen, these are not experienced operational folks. Oh sure, in good faith, he has some token technical folks and pilots in the mix to keep him and his cohorts honest and hold him to his word but the reality is that they are neophytes when it comes to arguing for budget approvals and expenditures. The financial types win 80% of the time and the operational experts lose. The result is that that money for equipment upgrades / maintenance / repairs is becoming harder to get. Engineering/Maintenance scramble to improvise. Equipment deteriorates faster. MEL devs and extensions increase. Routine maint gets deferred. Flt crews get issued new SOPs and QRH procedures to address the inadequacies. etc.
Each little issue on it's own is minor. Cummulatively, they're leading in one direction.
Where is the regulator in all this? A clue lies in the reason SMS was implemented in the first place. There regulator doesn't have enough inspectors. Inspectors have been relegated to examining the SMS processes in place and they're still reading all the process documentation. They don't even audit or review anymore. They "sample".
Nobody wants to see safety deteriorate but having at first embraced SMS and living with it for 3 yrs I'm actually now pondering the inevitable and for the first time in nearly 20 yrs giving some consideration to packing up the job I love and moving on before somebody gets hurt.
Last edited by nnc0; 30th Apr 2009 at 00:17.