Hindsight, they say, is a wonderful thing. True.
However, in our business with the frequent recurrent training pilots are mandated to undertake, the objective is to hopefully learn from others and avoid making those same mistakes again. Data shows that as an industry we must indeed be learning as accident and incident rates have declined steadily over the last 25 years. CRM training has, no doubt, played an integral part of this welcome improvement. Unfortunately though as humans, we will always find ourselves in situations that highlight our fallibility and these classic human factors events will be ever present, regardless of the amount of training undertaken. Professor James Reason's 'swiss cheese' model will always be around as long as we are.
So, I am not going to say what the crew did or didn't do correctly and I am not going to make a comment or judgement on their actions. I wasn't there! I do not know the full circumstances behind this event and neither does anyone else commenting on these forums at this stage, including the Company. The only people who do know what happened and why they took the decision they did is the crew themselves.
Making comments such as 'I wouldn't trust them anyway' (wing walkers) is one thing. Telling us what you'd actually do about it is quite another. So what would you do, shut down, disembark all the passengers on a narrow taxiway, leave the aircraft and get the engineer to sit in the seat while the aircraft is towed? Or stay on the aircraft while the engineer is in your seat? Or maybe the F/O could be the wing walker while you taxi? Or, perhaps, shut down, stay in the seat and trust the tug driver? Or forget waiting for the tug and just trust a wing walker and taxi slow? Or maybe better still, just go sick for every future LOS and any other destination that becomes an incident?
Decisions, decisions. Your call.......CAPTAIN!
Harry
Last edited by harry the cod; 9th Jul 2015 at 12:31.