Am I alone in feeling there is a worrying amount of rigidity being expressed in terms of "what to do if..."
The following stood out as an example;
acting instinctively and in contradiction with the briefing
OK, it's nitpicking but its the word "contradiction" that makes me uncomfortable. It suggests to my ears that the briefing is regarded as a
procedure first of all when it surely is only a suggestion or a guideline at best, and furthermore one that
requires sticking to and implies that to do otherwise is questionable as it
goes against the brief. We need to keep an open mind about what we will do in practice, and surely we should be at pains to make sure this is expressed and understood. It also ignores the fact that the briefing only covered a single engine failure and did not address the total loss of power and so was not applicable in any way at all.
Another example are the numerous suggestions that diverting to one's home base is preferable to going somewhere "unfamiliar" due to the need for a briefing, finding plates, landing performance, and apparently general unfamiliarity whatever that is, etc. Do professional pilots need "familiarity" with a field to land there safely? I ask you, how many of us have the home ILS plates directly to hand on every departure? Many/most won't I suspect. Do professional airmen esp those with modern FMS need plates to shoot an ILS? Why? Do professional airman usually have any trouble shooting an approach at an airfield as "unfamiliar" as STN? Do professional pilots not know how much - ballpark figures - length they need to land in non normal configs? And thus dismiss LTN's 2400m as unsuitable out of hand? To do the same for STN is even more far-fetched. What on earth do you
need a plate for if the ILS is self tuning, you've declared a mayday and its a blue sky day? Even if it claggy and you need to get down - and all of these remarks are based on need to do it - you know that 200ft aal is a DA that won't kill you no matter what at fields you know aren't terrain restricted. So you do grab a plate, just how much do you need to brief at a place like STN, even if you do regard it as somewhere in Outer Mongolia? It could probably be done in twenty seconds.
I don't mean these thought to refer specifically to the recent incident, its more some musings on our seemingly ever increasing reliance on procedures that were meant as guidance but morph over time into something far more rigid to the extent that some of them have all but become "law". From this follows a lack of awareness that they can be varied and eventually an inability to consider it. I don't think that is altogether the best way.
We all know
why procedures are there and
why we stick to them almost all the time, what bothers me is the ever decreasing awareness that sometimes it is better if you vary from them, or even abandon them on rare occasions. The human factors firewall we've built up around "sticking to procedures" could usefully have a few more gates in it I reckon.
I know this involves the development (read re-invention in some companies) of Airmansh*** . Oh B@llox! I nearly said it again, I'll get my coat ...