Interesting editorial in ‘Flight International’ regarding this incident, the main thrust of which was ‘why can’t airlines learn Flight Safety from previous incidents’? DL uses this latest PAL incident – (let’s call it what it really was - ‘a really close shave that came within inches of being [another] disaster’).
- [where was I?] Oh, yes… DL uses this latest PAL incident as a glaring example of how airlines seem incapable of learning from previous mistakes within the Industry.
….
(Pause while Wiley mounts his well-worn soap box...)
It shouldn’t take anyone with even a passing knowledge of the Industry and the recent history of PAL to understand why the PAL Flight Operations and/or Flight Safety Departments might not be in an ideal position to ‘learn from the Industry’s previous mistakes’. The answer lies in the make up of today’s PAL pilot workforce. I’m not saying that the PAL pilots are any less competent than any other pilot workforce, but the fact is, whatever their individual competencies or level of professionalism might be, they are a hotch potch of returnees and blow-ins from God only knows where who were appointed to their current jobs in circumstances that should be depressingly familiar to just about everyone reading this site. They also work under a system – (a system PAL Management, like others before them in the same Hemisphere, went to some trouble to create) - where they, the pilots, have none of the protections of union representation.
If this crew is anything to go by, PAL management has got the pilot workforce it wanted after they broke the back of the local pilots’ union not too many years ago. We are informed that the pilot who did the walkaround at Agana did not see any damage to the exterior of the aircraft ‘because there was a blackout at the airfield’. It would appear from this comment that the current crop of PAL pilots do not use a flashlight when conducting a walkaround – even when doing one after a go around caused by a GPWS ‘Terrain’ warning (and, I strongly suspect, a clearly discernable impact, which if not noticed by the tech crew up in the cockpit, [which is debatable], would certainly have been noticed by the hapless cabin crew seated at the rear doors of the aircraft.)
I won’t go into what I believe really happened after the crew landed safely at Agana after their second approach and what led them to decide to fly the aircraft back to main base, but I think there are many here who would come to a very similar conclusion to mine… (see the last line of the paragraph before last if you need a hint).
Forty years ago, the highly trained, very professional Merchant Marine officers and their often troublesome seamen were to a very large degree replaced in the Western world’s commercial maritime fleets when ‘bright’ Management saw that they could replace these ‘expensive’ officers and seamen with ‘cheap’ Third World crews. The loss rate in today’s merchant fleets, although not widely reported in the world press unless it results in an oil slick on a European beach, is now at near astronomical levels, and the level of competency of many merchant marine crews who ply today’s sealanes is questionable at the very least.
How many times have survivors of small boat sinkings testified to cargo ships steaming close by them, (or hitting them!), and disappearing over the horizon without seeing them because obviously no one was on watch? And recently, we have the case of the sunken car ferry in the English Channel where not one but two ships collided with the wreck, one of them after all manner of warnings were issued to the ship – but it just continued on into the clearly marked prohibited zone until it hit the wreck?
This, I fear, is the future for Aviation if the ‘clever’ Managers we see today continue to cut into all the ‘unnecessary’ trappings professional pilots have insisted are necessary to maintain the Industry’s (already fast failing) safety record. And by the time the clever managers are seen to have been wrong, just like in the shipping industry, it will be too late. The ‘cheap’ airlines with their ‘cheap’ crews who can only fly on automatics (which always work, right?) will have taken over, and many smart people, I suspect, will have learnt to conduct business and take their holidays within driving distance of home.