What we may be looking at is the result of a very tall “stovepipe” culture, which is not unique to American (although they may have perfected it). The deeper you are in the stovepipe, the more hands a body of knowledge must pass through before it gets to you. It becomes a giant game of telephone, wherein core concepts, extracted from documents that are already tortuously written by regulators and manufacturers, etc., are re-written, “simplified”, (generally a no-no in high reliability theory), interpreted, etc. By the time it gets to you, you have no real understanding of the original intent or the original context, and are only expected to trust your company's administrative rigor.
This is partially intentional as operators attempt to control the interpretation of various procedures and policies; consider those operators who do not issue the full Parts A, B and C Op Specs to their pilots, or who only provide access to the MEL while on the ground. But it can eventually lead to a wide divergence from the original meaning.
A cross-section of experienced pilots from legacy backgrounds will have a wide range of interpretations of how something is done, based on their formative training at an established carrier. In some cases, they will not realize that their carrier's methodology was but one “means of compliance” among many.
Perhaps the same problem has migrated into the training of those who manage the company's participation in the accident investigation.
Last edited by Mansfield; 3rd Jan 2011 at 10:28.