Re beancounters and false economies.
I was a beancounter, mostly in the car industry but I started on that road in aerospace, when I saw stupid financial decisions being made and then learned enough about cost accounting to find out some of what was going wrong.
When taught how to do it properly in a company where it was well developed, three things became apparent that are relevant here:
1. The financial effects of a decision should be based on the smallest unit affected. That could be anything from an individual machine (or aeroplane, or even instrument) to the entire company.
2. Like computers, garbage in results in garbage out. We did the best we could to find all the effects and quantify them. But if somebody fails to tell the beancounters that an effect of economising on training is a risk of a very expensive accident, they may miss it. Shouldn’t, but may – there are less than perfect beancounters, just as there are less than perfect flight crews. (Looks to me like AF447 passengers were unlucky to be victims of both.)
3. The decisions were made not by beancounters but by management, who either believed what we told them, and acted upon it, or went their own way regardless. I saw both – but never (in the industry I was in) where safety was compromised. When considering fixing reliability or warranty issues, the safety of the user was given very high priority. For airlines, it is now apparent that training “economies” risk a hugely expensive crash. Ask AF if they now think economising on manual flying training etc. was a good decision. And who told the “beancounters” there what it could cost in terms of SAR as well as the future legal cases and compensation, if poor training etc. could result in such costs?
Just my 2p-th.