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PJ2, just wanted to add to the chorus of "cracking post" that seems to be the order of the day.
One thing I wanted to add though was that it's not just happening in aviation, it's happening in almost every industry you care to name. The financial industry has basically reigned supreme in the West since the '80s, and as such it becomes the ambition of all MBAs to work there. As a result, business courses tend to focus on finance and profit above all else, and so what we're finding is that senior management and executives have no connection to the industry they end up working in, other than a superficial knowledge of how to cut costs - I believe (and I hope you agree) that this is one of the root causes of the "cost of everything and the value of nothing" syndrome that you so rightly point out.
In aviation, it has led to a top-down edict that automation is to be used wherever possible, pilots and cabin crew's interests become a distant second to that of the shareholders, and a seeming failure to understand that while airline safety has consistently improved over the years due in part to technical advances, a disturbing rise in the number of accidents caused in whole or in part by loss of situational awareness (whether that be due to poor training, overreliance on automation or fatigue) is insidiously eroding those advances.
But it is definitely happening in other industries too. For example, healthcare in the US is among the best in the world if you happen to be rich and a complete joke if you are not, because of the incestuous relationship it has with the insurance industry. Even the banking industry has not been unscathed at the high street level, because no-one in the high street divisions wanted to believe that the investment divisions were building a house of cards with their money. The big one in my industry was the tech crash of 2001, where the MBAs and executives figured that the Y2K problem was over, and at the same time decided that seeing as programmers only work to a design spec anyway, why pay 5 people here when they could get 15 people for the same money in India or the Far East? They found out about that one the hard way (though I hasten to add that this is not a slur on the abilities of the people in those countries, the main problems were poor communication and a lack of accountability in some of the offshore firms), although tellingly a lot of my peers who graduated CompSci and Software Engineering believing it would make them rich moved into management, and it was largely those of us who had it in our blood who remained.
In our case it was much the same as yours - what management didn't realise was that while we did code to specifications and design, the unwritten part of what we did was work amongst ourselves to correct shortcomings in the design, or realise when part of the spec was unclear and confusing and work with the designers to clarify and resolve the issue. Of course, we have the advantage over the outsourced folks that it's a matter of crossing an office floor or maybe going up a flight of stairs to raise an issue, whereas they would have to plan a conference call with all parties present, which could take days.
In short, we were the last line of defence when things didn't go to plan and relied on our experience and problem-solving abilities to make it work and get things back on track - much the same as you are.
Anyways, that's my ramble - again, brilliant post!
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Last edited by DozyWannabe; 19th Aug 2011 at 13:48.