Originally Posted by Ex Cargo Clown
As the industry attempts to cut costs and lose very experienced, knowledgeable and intelligent staff I can see an increase in incidents, the same way as there will be increases in load errors etc as CLC becomes common place.
Deregulation promised passengers, industry leaders and employees alike that aviation could be done cheaply. It cannot.
It was assumed, and not by pilots, that automation promised that airliners could be crewed cheaply because the airplane "flew itself". This legitimated the notions that crew complements could be reduced, training footprints shortened and standards lowered without result. The proof of such folly is in the numbers.
Many knew in the early 80's that cheap yet profitable aviation transportation was a devil's promise and both expected and wrote that the quality of accidents would change while the quantity would remain stubbornly level. It can be done inexpensively and smartly, but not without serious feedback loops which tell managers when they've cut too close to the bone. It is precisely that expertise which is undervalued because the products of flight safety are, "nothing happened". In the discourse of business which values "quantifying" above all else, one cannot quantify for flight operations who are focussed on profit, "what does not occur". There is no ledger entry for "money (and lives) saved". The necessary tension between operations and safety managers should be strong but often, safety departments are organizationally placed under operations, funded by operations and staffing decisions are made by operations.
A flight safety department requires institutionalized, formal independence from both flight operations and maintenance.
The industry's efforts to reduce the accident rate yielded spectacular results into the early '70s where it has essentially leveled off but the causal pathways are materially different, led by loss of control and CFIT. The precursors to such accidents are almost certainly in the data but it requires intelligent, experienced eyes to see the patterns and then present them to a management legitimately although perhaps exclusively consumed by the daily pageant of on-time departures and related operational issues.
Such factors are part of a larger phenomenon which is essentially political and therefore economic in nature and far too large a discussion for one thread which extends back to 1970 or so. But it is the pattern which connects many threads here on PPRuNe and everywhere aviation is seriously discussed.
All of these observations are in reality far more subtle, seemingly inconsistent and difficult to discern than can be portrayed in a threaded conversation. At some point, regress from the cockpit to larger organizational factors must necessarily be book-ended, problems analyzed and solutions highlighted and communicated for change.
What is the pattern that connects Islamabad, Tripoli, Mangalore, Amsterdam, Madrid, Buffalo, and Sao Paulo to name a few?
PJ2