At a safety meeting in one large Asian airline, where FOQA, FDM is used extensively for finger-pointing and punitive measures (grounding, money fines etc.), I have once asked if all this data could be used to identify who would fly with the least deviations, with the least exceedance, and if we could all learn how and why some pilots (anonymously of course) have less or more FOQA events.
Maybe by studying the "good" examples, we could also draw seriously constructive conclusions, instead of the slap-on-the-wrist attitude of most of the airlines in the region and elsewhere.
The answer I got was that it would require analyzing too much data, and it's easier just to blame on a FOQA trigger.
When you think they have up to 80 employees whose job is tracking all FOQA events, it would be nice to praise instead of blaming. It seems to me that the human resources should be available anyway.
As a comparative note, slightly drifting from the original post, our modern societies usually look in other sectors what makes a success and not a failure: we look at why/how Bill Gates became one of the most successfull, why or how Hussein Bolt is the fastest sprinter, etc. Our society rarely studies in great depth why or how the slowest sprinter failed to perform, or what startup company shut down.
In other areas of our economy, we have a tendency to study success. In FOQA, we study pilot errors. Any chance to reverse this scenario? Would it benefit in the long term?
Last edited by Jetdriver; 29th Nov 2013 at 13:29.