good thread. I agree with BOAC - lets not pollute this interesting discussion with pointlss comments about Rad alts and autolands.
Originally Posted by BOAC
There are substantial lessons we all need to learn from recent accidents where 'automatics' have played a deadly part. Those who dismiss the Schipol crash as 'irrelevant' preach a highly dangerous, blaze and over-confident doctrine which serves no-one's interests but their own. In all these accidents, supposedly competent and experienced crews have allowed the unthinkable to happen. These events appear to be becoming less isolated than we had assumed they were. This is the major issue we need to address without delay.
well said - however thats why i think that the type 1, 2,3 issue on the opening post
IS relevent. I know the EK error got through the system but in general, as pointed out, there are checks and balances to trap the type 1 and 2 errors. As demonstrate by the horror at the stunning level of 'incompetance' that cause the turkish crash, the type 3 error has no error traps on an operational basis. It is assumed that these errors are prevented by the training and checking regime. Quite why that appears to be no longer the case I don't know. Although to be fair, and risk a politically incorrect flaming, it does still appear that decent operators from enlightened societies are still preventing and trapping these sort of errors. And its important that we understand why, so that we don't go down the same road.
The reason why we tend to point fingers more at places like Turkey (and as pointed out - Egyption, Brazilian are another couple that spring immediately to mind) is not because we are all superior western sky gods, it is because a society that instantly mobilises and has government and press output such as we've seen from turkey, almost by definition cannot be 'safe' from a human factor point of view.
After all how can Turkish possibly learn, or train out whatever behaviour caused this accident if they refuse to acknowledge that it exists.
Couple this attitude with the authoritarian / subservient issue in many cultures whereby an FO dare not question the mighty captain then you have a real safety issue.
Why does this appear to happening more and more? who knows, perhaps its that the recent aviation expansion has thrust some operators and regulatory regimes into top divisions - where they don't really deserve to belong. it doesn't matter how new the aircraft are, how shiney the paint and what club (star alliance in this case) you belong to. If your regulator, and accident investigator thinks that its job is about face saving and shifting blame then you will never, ever get the human domain correct to trap those type 3 errors.