I genuinely do not want to pour oil onto the fire but the cracks have been appearing for some time and most are in denial or have a misplaced sense of loyalty to the industry rather than ensuring that safety is paramount at all times.
It is widespread and will get worse. Sad but true.
I spent some time last night reading the "near death experience" thread about Air India. This event is another side of the same coin, in a different discipline but part of the one industry of which everyone was once and rightly so proud
For me, the common theme in among all this is the headlong race towards the lowest cost model, driven in no small part by the preponderance of beancounter mentality in too many areas.
AD's not complied with, and apparently the supervisory system "missed" the non compliance. Parts being used where the provenance and paper trail is at best questionable and in some cases non existent or completely fraudulent. Ramp and line checks that manage somehow to miss that a cleaner had omitted to remove speed tape from alternate static ports for nearly 2 days. Ramp engineers that jack up a 777 wheel and turn it 90 degrees before the new crew arrive to save doing a tyre change during a 3 hour turnround, and say "they can do that when it gets to the home station".
Pilots with inadequate experience being signed off to fly types for which their experience level is woefully inadequate, pilots with forged or fraudulently gained licences, pilots that fail simulator checks being passed through a bypass system that ignores their failings. Training environments that actively discourage "extra learning" or "experimenting in the sim to find what the real edges of the operating envelope are". SOP's that do their best to ensure that hands on time is minimised.
The downgrading of the whole passenger experience to the extent of a "rugby scrum" around the gate from departure -40 and no respect for families with small children.
Double standards in ground handling, dangerous and damaged equipment being used to support ground operations. Management that block the submission of MOR's to protect their own positions.
The question one has to ask is how it was allowed to happen, and how the status ante can be restored so that aviation can be demonstrated to be operating at levels that are really safe.
I don't have an answer to this, I'm not even going to try and suggest any, I know from experience that if I do, I will get public abuse and vilification from the people that are dressed like the emperor in no clothes and a significant and probably equal number of private messages and E-mails that tell me I am on the mark, and to not give up speaking out.
Do we have to see a really big smoking hole in the ground before "the system" responds to the gradual and insidious erosion of so many standards across the board. The massive damage to the wing structure of the Qantas A 380 after the uncontained engine failure could have so easily ended very differently, the BA777 double engine failure that was fortunately almost a unique event, but it happened, and again, could have had a very different outcome, and there are other incidents that others could quote that are similar. The recent A320 into the Hudson, Sioux City, the Gimli Glider, Air transat into the Azores.
I will ask this question, but I don't want answers as such, it's personal to you.
How many pilots reading reports like Sioux City, the gimli Glider. the A320 ditching and the others mentioned above have read them and thought, I'm not sure if I could have dealt with that scenario, I don't know enough about the aircraft to be able to do it?
If your answer to this thought is positive, are you motivated to find out more about the type you fly to change that situation?
If you then have sought to improve your knowledge levels or skills, how was that received? Positively or negatively?
The answer to these few questions may not be comfortable, but it may be very revealing of the real underlying attitude to safety in the air.
Huge fines are not the answer, if the operators are already struggling to make ends meet, and are cutting corners in order to do so, taking large sums off them is not going to improve that in any way, unless a way to take the fines directly and only out of shareholder dividends can be found, so that the shareholders are better motivated to watch more carefully what the people who are responsible for that shareholding are doing.
If the operators are lossmaking in the first place, then fining them could be the straw that breaks them. Is that in anyones interest?
Then there are the worldwide cultural and financial issues that also are a factor. An Airline from a small country may be very hard pressed to pay the fees and other charges at an international airport, if they negotiate hard and get a reduced handling rate, should they also then be forced to accept a poorer standard of service as a result? Should they be forced to accept significant delays because the ground handler does not have enough serviceable ramp equipment to do the turn round on all the flights that have arrived at the same time?
The airline industry is probably the most regulated industry after the nuclear power industry. Rightly so, the consequences for both of failure in any area are huge. We have seen for all the wrong reasons a gradual and caustic erosion of standards in some areas over a long period of time, but that erosion has in some areas been hidden by the massive and equally significant improvement in things like airborne systems, navigation aids and systems, computer performance, size and scalability, all of which mean that the information and analysis capability available to everyone in the industry is light years ahead of what it used to be.
The one very big downside to automation of any sort, on the ground, in the air, or in support systems is that they are subject to the same problem, rubbish in = 4 x rubbish out. In some scenarios, there is too much irrelevant information.
If I am presented with a printout of 60 pages, and there is only one line in that 60 pages that is significant or out of order, I am likely to miss it.
If I am presented with 12 lines of ECAM messages, without experience or in depth knowledge of exactly how the thing works, how do I determine which of those 12 is the most urgent?
If I know that making the right decision may cost me my hard earned and even more difficult to replace job, how do I square that circle?
I don't have an all embracing answer. What I do know is that with the way things are economically in many countries right now, the wrong decisions could end up having a very high cost in lives over the coming years, and silence is no longer a solution.