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Old 3rd Apr 2015, 10:39
  #2987 (permalink)  
somethingclever
 
Join Date: Dec 2008
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There is only one solution

Over 3000 posts and just a precious few scratching the surface for a real world solution. Instead we get same nonsense responses all over again. First, the revenge squad who take pride in their old testament-style craving for easy answers in their black and white world. The "this guy was a mass murdering psychopath, case closed"-brigade. It's a completely meaningless attitude to bring to the table and effectively what it means is that you are happy for the next incident which will be coming down the line. It will be a simple matter of time. All you are doing is scrubbing out the number on the "X days since last murdercide" sign and going off to lunch.

Then the technobabbling nerds who think the door mechanism has anything to do with it. It doesn't. At all. For one simple reason. You can not invent away lack of trust. You either trust your pilots or you do not.

After that come the home grown lawyers with more paragraphs in the works for us. Some more pages to read, documents to sign to somehow magically prevent or reveal mental problems. How is this ever going to work? Forcing people to feel good? Forcing people to admit being unfit to fly? You don't think a person with mental issues will be able to con his way over such hurdles? In a heartbeat buddy. Tougher checks during training, that will do the trick, right? Tougher checks during medicals, while at work, while at home. Force pilots to sign a paper every turn-around declaring their mental fitness. All these things simply ADD MORE PRESSURE. Once again, you either trust your pilots, or you do not. And so what if you have all these fine checks to keep the people with problems out. You can have problems at any point during your career, and in fact you probably will. Especially now that the industry has abandoned every pretence of safety over profit and is clamping down on everything from sick leave to fuel burn. It's an intentionally sick industry choosing money over stability and it works until it doesn't work anymore. Captain America with grey temples and 30000 hrs can snap. You may not like to think so, but he can. You can. Because, gasp, you are HUMAN. The industry specifically and society in general would do well to accept that reality. We are reverse engineering our lives. We decide what's best for the bottom line and work backwards to see how the people need to act and feel for that to come true. It's a bad idea in general and a down right lethal recipe in aviation.

The only way, period, is to have crew you can trust. To get that, you need crew that trust you, the company and the only way to get that is to have a non-punitive and inviting reporting system that is backed by an absolutely rock solid support system. A system that is designed with the expressed goal of getting you diagnosed, treated and returned to service. That is trust on a human level. You can always come to us and express your concerns and feelings. We will listen and we will help. Our team is standing by for your benefit whatever the problem may be. We will not turn our backs and we will not kick you out.

But today we don't have that. Today we have bean counters and lawyers on one side, and faceless employee numbers on the other. If you report mental problems they will say "ah, looks like 342323 is broken, let's go ahead and remove that one from the production line. Bring in 342324 please." Mental illness needs to be treated like any other problem, instead of this fearful stigmatisation that never seems to let up. Not a single LOL-insurance that I'm aware of is valid for mental problems. If you lose your medical due to depression, you get nothing. How can anyone in their right mind claim that aviation is safety-focused? Safety, money permitting maybe. Safety, time permitting maybe. Until the industry backs off again and implements a human-centric approach to operations, problems will keep getting worse. Until the industry encourages employees to come in and get effective treatment, we are simply waiting for the next incident.
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