The whole Cathay ethos to flying, seems to be to overly complicate the mission with cumbersome SOPs, which provide some sort of management recourse if something ever goes wrong. That is, the SOPS are not there as professional guidance, but they are there to bury you and protect the system at all costs if need be.
As an example, and this is one of many, in event of a runway change a simple Airbus mnemonic of FRPP would guide a "thinking pilot" through the procedural dynamics of the event. Yet, over at CX, there is near two pages in the FCTM of how this simple task should be done. It's overcomplicated.
Since CX SOPs have been pushed on KA, I feel flying standards deteriorated and the task of flying into China has been complicated due unworkable SOPs- and correct me if I'm wrong, but I've been told PEK was deemed unsuitable as a training or checking sector because of this by the CX TRG Dept?
KA has pushed away ever so slightly by binning a number of CX SOPs and reintroducing raw data flying. Albeit, with questionably restrictive parameters.
Last edited by Gnadenburg; 1st September 2011 at 05:37.