Cockpit crisis
In five years, over 50 commercial airplanes crashed in loss-of-control accidents. What’s going on?
MT
Agreed, but OTOH, (looking on the bright side, there is a Darwinian process at play...
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The failure is a loss of direction that has resulted in the capitulation of the standards based flight operations to the acquiescence to the beancounters and politically correct crowd that pervades flight operations management. Not the flt ops guys fault per se, they are the result of the selection process that has developed from the invasion into a critical process by those of the MBA set, in a world of deregulation and the associated arbitrage of standards that occurs.
Instead of concentrating on quality by maintaining the training standards and using the technology enhancements to improve margins, the standards have been allowed to decline on the hope that technology may save the day. As you generally are dead for an extended period, I would prefer the use of technology to enhance standards by maintaining the core skills, but the bean counters, and by inference, the passengers, would prefer to play Russian Roulette with their lives to save a few pennies/shekels/Bhat/Rupee as may be applicable. Reading the available chicken entrails, it still appears that the issue has not got to the point of pain in the publics perception that is necessary to turn the SS Titanic around, so there are still icebergs ahead. The irrational state of the industry in respect to capacity expansion/yield decay remains in ascendency.
Re Rat5/attitude is a give away of speed... true enough, but the downside is that you actually have to know enough in the first place to recognise the changes, and more problematically, the initial speed decay/attitude change is not large order, but diverges from normal rapidly as it is an unstable process in the case of TK1951... it accelerates rapidly once it has been given enough time to get out of sorts. Little deviations are triggers to bigger and wusser things portended.