Eliminating Crew-Caused Accident
As the author of "Eliminating Crew-Caused Accidents" I'm pleased to know it is still being read years after my retirement! I am thinking of updating and reissuing it as the industry does not seem to have changed much in the last 10 years or so. It's depressing that on re-reading it I realise it is mostly only the accident references that need updating, and in some areas the situation may be getting worse.
This is somewhat off-topic (although the subject of "First Officers sectors" gets a whole appendix to itself in the paper) , but it still seems crazy that we have the situation where the industry spends scarce resources on CRM training to encourage pilots to delegate the flying tasks when managing high workload and non-normal situations, and widely recognises the benefits of delegated flying procedures ("monitored approach") when really poor weather is predicted, but then ignores the fact that these go hand in hand: we should be doing this ALL THE TIME. Then we won't see the situations where pilots are "caught out" in adverse situations developing bit by bit (the most common cuasae or "crew error" accidents) or weather that's worse than expected, by inadequate company SOPs - and then blamed for mis-judgements or other mistakes. There is a cost-free alternative which produces overall far more reliable crew performance, leading to fewer money-losing (and in the worst case life-destroying) errors.
Steve Last