Porker1;
Originally Posted by From the article
- Re-organisation to create a new job of "Head of Flight Safety" reporting directly to the boss of AF;
This is a very revealing and important "demand".
Very often, and certainly in organizations which exhibit a high degree of structural and communications dysfunction, the Chief of Flight Safety, (generic title, indicating the boss of flight safety) of an airline reports only to the Chief of Flight Operations, (generic title, pointing to the boss of flight operations).
While it would seem logical for those not in the industry to have the safety guy reporting to the operations guy so he or she knows whats going on, the operations leaders' primary goal is cost control and running the business, not safety. Because of the conflict of interest between the safety guy and the operations guy's positions, the CEO or whoever is in charge then gets filtered safety information because safety costs and isn't a profit center for the corporation while controlling costs always gets atta-boys and banana-pellets from the CEO or whatever. So the guy in charge of the whole organization doesn't really know what's going on because "bad news" never travels up to the top in such an arrangement. Unless the leader is a safety guy him/herself and actually understands how to do safety and what it takes to do it right, ignorance, or, rather, plausible deniability, is bliss and it works, because most of the time "nothing" happens the operations people can rest on their "success", and point to the notion of "accident" (which mean "an occurrence that was not preventable and that happens once in a while") to excuse the organization.
This is very simplified I know but many of us have lived inside this kind of organizational dysfunction (which I would term "intentional" because these are not, by and large, stupid people who run the show), long enough to smell it when it's there. So the French pilots aren't off the mark in this.