Oh Good - The Experts have arrived. To save time, allow me to distill the accumulated knowledge.
CAA/FAA are useless... Industry Tombstone Safety Protocols are useless... Most if not all cabin safety equipment is useless... Brace positions and other cabin safety procedures are useless... Flight Attendant training is useless... etc. etc.
Those of you who read this thread and actually do this for a living should be aware that the truth, as always lies between the two extremes - The slightly disturbing over-confidence and optimism of
oldbalboy does no more to reassure than the absurd extremes of
cockney steve and
Piltdown Man: The idea that you are entirely right and everybody else is entirely wrong is something that most of us grow out of early on in life, as is the idea that we know better than the accumulated wisdom of others paid to have knowledge. The real problem, and probable loss to safety in general, is that something that might either be a good idea, or at least merit further examination gets lost in a tsunami of inflammatory and self-regarding bull!!!! - It's a Signal-to-Noise thing.
The Experts on this thread are no different from the other Experts that we meet on-board - Those who know that their mobile phones don't really need to be off when we ask, or who know that the turbulence has eased so that now is a good time to ignore the seatbelt sign, or know so much that they don't need to watch the briefing, and so on. Let's do what we always do and smile sweetly while thinking about something else that is more pleasant: We won't win after all - They're so much cleverer than we are. In the meantime, enhancements will be made to our safety procedures over time and some of them will be made as a result of knowledge gained from accidents and incidents: We all know, understand and accept that process because that's what we do for a living. When those enhancements occur it won't be as a result of the PPRuNe experts.
