Eastern Airways recruitment

[Flightrider]

Shell Management,

I would not wish an accident on anyone, but if you believe that pilot experience is the sole criteria in avoiding accidents, I am fearful that you may be disappointed at some point in your career. One could and perhaps should invoke the names of the experienced KLM and Dan-Air Captains who sadly both met their deaths on the island of Tenerife under very different circumstances. In both cases, their experience did not prevent the very different situations which developed on those days three years apart with identical consequences - the loss of all souls aboard the aircraft which they respectively commanded.

All that said, I would say to you that the hours requirements laid down by oil companies are a farce and may actually be detrimental to the overriding objective of safety which you are trying to achieve. I have encountered several captains in my career with, on paper, substantial flying experience who would pass the paper tests set by oil companies, yet I would seriously baulk at setting foot on an aircraft under their command.

Within those paper requirements, an airline flying for an oil company could quite happily go out and secure the services of a contract pilot who has the requisite experience on paper but who has gone from one carrier to the next with an extremely patchy record of LPCs and OPC passes or failures and with no time built up with any particular operator to provide certainty of adherence to (or even knowledge of) that carrier's SOPs. I must stress that this is not a comment directed at Eastern in any way but rather should be seen as a general broadside against the oil industry's ridiculous belief that hours equals safety. It does not.

An airline - and above all, its passengers - may be far better served by a pilot with less hours but who has accumulated those hours with the same airline under control of a quality training programme. I'd far rather be flying with a 25-30 year old captain with 2,500 hours on type with the same airline from the start of his/her career than I would with a 40-year old captain with 5,000 hours built up with ten years at ten different airlines. Your focus should be on quality assurance and training, rather than hours. Anything less than that smacks of complacency, and I offer no apologies for saying that your posting came across to me as riotously complacent.

I sincerely hope - and I genuinely do - that it does not take an accident to shake you from that complacency.

Again, I stress that this is not a posting which is intended or should be read in any way of being critical of Eastern. It is certainly not, for I have no specific knowledge of what they do or the pilots who fly for them. It should purely be taken as being critical of ill-considered requirements imposed by oil companies on airlines. We don't tell Shell or BP how to run an oil rig, yet a key aspect of safety in the airline business - the supply of properly distilled aviation fuel - depends on you. Airlines audit the end product, ensure that the fuel is safe - regardless of how you've done it - and use it. In the same way, you should audit and assure yourselves that operators are safe, but leave them to determine the means of achieving safety through pilot training and quality assurance to deliver your passengers safely to their intended destination.

And by the way, the broadside against BP is, quite frankly, morally reprehensible. I would hope that anyone who is genuinely from Shell management would have sufficient gumption to post here to publicly disown your views as not representing those of the company to which you puport to belong.