PPRuNe Forums - View Single Post - Indonesian airliner skids off runway
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Old 22nd Jan 2017, 00:24
  #53 (permalink)  
rob_ginger
 
Join Date: Mar 2008
Location: Sydney Australia
Age: 73
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The "culture" is a real problem

I have never read an aviation safety report citing rate-of-pay as a primary cause or contributing factor in an incident or crash.
Before you can comprehend the air safety problem you have to have an idea of the "culture" in the country. It's a long time (~25 years) since I spent 6 months living there (current residents feel free to contradict me), but I was just amazed at what I saw then.

There is poverty everywhere - catch the train in to Jakarta and for the last few miles the sides of the track are packed with the carboard and tin "houses" of people who can't afford to live anywhere else. So a permanent government job is like gold - so much so that the employees at the bottom of the ladder generally contribute some of their monthly pay to their supervisor to say "Thank you" for their continued employment.. The supervisor in his turn says "Thank you" to his boss, and so on up the pyramid.

This "culture" means that a lot of people worry about doing something that will lose them their job, and sometimes this consideration overrides safety considerations. So it's not really "rate of pay", but more worry about "no pay any more", and that's not conducive to good decision making.

I refused to fly domestic when I was there. Especially after a colleague (with a PPL) told me about his flight into Bandung on Merpati. They were in a old Fokker circling waiting for the fog to clear. On the third circuit the pilot saw the runway diagonally ahead through a hole in the fog, sideslipped all the way down, neatly straitened up and greased it on. Great flying, but not exactly a "stabilised approach". But getting there is more important than all those silly rules and regulations.
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