infrequentlflyer789;
I find it more than slightly scary. Am I the only one ?
No, you are not.
It has been almost three decades now, under a neoliberal political economy that the profession of "airline pilot" has been under serious attack by a de-regulated industry characterized by cash-strapped or bankrupt airlines which think that pilots are paid too much and should be paid what "the market" thinks they should be paid. Like the Colgan First Officer who was living at home with Mom and Dad in Seattle on US$16,000/year and commuting to Newark.
A veteran pilot acting as F/O on a commuter aircraft with a major Canadian carrier makes under CAD$40,000/year. A first year nurse makes more. An entire generation of potential pilots has taken a look at how expensive it is to get into the business, how shaky and hostile the business is, how pilots are viewed by just about everyone but especially airline managements (can anyone say "Crandall"?) who, because these airplanes now fly themselves through the automation that managements spent a lot of money on, don't need to pay well and don't need to hire keen young people and don't need talent. Along with the rest of us, their retirements have been destroyed, (long before October, 2008).
So in exchange for the hundreds of thousands of dollars in personal investment to get the university degree, the licenses, the instrument and multi-engine endorsements and the time-building as well as risking one's life in the bush while hauling or lifting just about everything, budding pilots looking for a career, essentially buy a lottery ticket which offers a slim chance to get hired by a connector and later maybe get on with a major carrier. The odds and the rewards these days are both tiny, in comparison to other professions and careers, and wildly changed since I began in the early '70's.
Of course life is constantly filled with disappointments and mature adults deal with them quietly on a daily basis, aviation has turned itself into such an enormous disappointment for those who used to have stars in their eyes and a fire in their belly about flying for an airline, that those with the intelligence, the ability, the self-discipline, the resources, the patience and the luck have gone elsewhere for their life's work because aviation is as never before, a harsh mistress.
There are many reasons why more than a dozen airline crews have stalled their aircraft but the "headwaters" of all these streams which collect in one thematic "river" lie, to some degree, in the way this industry has gone. It was always a tough industry, but the rewards for those who stuck it out were always there. No longer. A lot of guys my age have said the industry has changed and they're glad to be out of it. They say they miss the people, miss the layovers, miss the airplanes, miss the beautiful nights over the Pacific or the Atlantic but don't miss the business. Young people are very savvy and expect to be treated better than corporations have treated their parents.
Paying more doesn't make a better pilot. But those who would have made fine aviators have gone into medicine, law, education, engineering, (but not politics, economics, sales or the corporate ladder.)
Some here will ask what the hell has all that got to do with AF447? But there are a lot of others here who know, only too well.
Aviation's lessons are not altered by technology; they are merely displaced, delayed or hidden until a combination of factors come together and this time there is no intervening error-trap which prevents an accident. Automation has made aviation far safer, and that includes the automation we rarely think about such as ATC, weather forecasting, communications, navigation and tracking which all support a heavily-automated aircraft.
In my view, the industry long ago passed that point where being a pilot meant something... a pilot was someone who had "address", who was always just slightly cranky if things weren't just so, who bristled when his skill and his thinking were called into question and who knew his airplane, the air that kept his aircraft aloft and the weather, all expressed in a kind of sixth sense that can only be pointed to when it happens. it can't be written about so that someone in an MCPL classroom "gets it"; its catalyst is adrenaline which teaches an abiding respect borne of a nurtured but mature fear of what an airplane is capable of.
This isn't romanticizing aviation or a pilot's life. This is describing attitudes and beliefs that are proven to keep aviation safe while the beancounting MBAs and senior managements, who know the cost of everything but not the value of their employees, have long forgotten about the business they are in, viewing aviation from afar at a desk in front of a monitor. They expect pilots to "manage" their airplane as they "manage" budgets. I laughed the first time I ever read that description of what I did for a living. But I remained just cranky enough all the same.
Stalling one's airplane? Unconscionable for a pilot. It is the worst failure one can visit upon oneself and one's passengers. What we are wrestling with is, Where did the stall begin?
This is a human factors and organization question; it is not a technical question. What and where are the antecedents? Training? Hiring? Standards? Expectations? Licensing? Ego? One thing is certain in human factors. The stall did not begin with the pitch-up. Perhaps a few are going to understand the thread running through all these notions which I have described. There are those here, including myself, who have been around aviation long enough to not to have to prove these statements to anyone because we know, to a greater or lesser extent, they're true. We knew in the mid-80's that automation was going to be a problem not because humans don't play well with autoflight systems, but because of the way managements saw how automation could reduce training costs, hiring costs, and salaries because "anyone could fly these aircraft". That is the way it was marketed and many here knew then what was coming.
So, no, you are not the only one, infrequentflyer789. It is not accidents per se that is disconcerting. It is the nature and the "quality" of accidents that is disturbing, and one does not fix such things by legislation, more automation or more training alone.