Originally Posted by tucumseh
Always a Sapper
The answer is in Alfred the Great's earlier post....
Quote:
In knowingly taken an article not on the RTS into the cockpit
One must be able to reconcile the Statement of Operating Intent and Usage, Aircraft Specification, Safety Case and RTS. In this case, you couldn't. According to previous reporting, it seems this subject came up in court, because he stated that it was known he took photographs, and some were on open display. Perhaps he concluded there was tacit approval; and it would seem nobody challenged him. After all, very few Aircraft Document Sets can be reconciled, and many RTSs are, frankly, nonsense. It works both ways. There is a duty to ensure the ADS is correct. At the risk of repeating myself, we have discussed many here that were not, including Chinook Mk2 and Sea King ASaC (the latter was a lazy copy of the old AEW Mk2, to such an extent it could be characterised as dangerous). There is an organisational fault here, and the pilot is the latest victim. He may have erred, but prior negligence occurred, only for the pilot to be hammered for the final act.
tuumseh
Thank you for your answer and I can see your reasoning. But my original question wasn't aimed at the Pilot although I struggle to see why he took the camera into the cockpit to take pictures for a manual as stated in the thread above in the first place, surely that was an exercise that could have been achieved with the aircraft on the ground and in a place where he could apply 100% of his attention on getting the right pictures or while the second pilot was flying the aircraft.
At the end of the day the only reason he was there in the first place was to fly the aircraft from point A to point B in a safe manner, while applying 100% of his attention to that task, not playing David Bailey or write a tech manual. And he was also the Captain of the Aircraft to boot so more responsibility and possibly a reason why no one questioned him?
But then what do I know as mere SLF who has in the past on many occasions trusted the flight crew to get me from one place to another in one piece while putting their complete and undivided attention to the task in hand while doing it and no doubt will do so again in the future on the civilian airlines... I, along with every other person on the aircraft trust them to do it and to be perfectly honest the trust in their training, competence and professional ability to do so is generally so great that we actually don't really worry about it (apart from when someone is stood at the end of the cabin waving their arms about and reading the 'actions on' sheet).
It's a historical fact that the whole sorry incident was caused by an object getting jammed between the seat arm and the control, that it was a camera and whether it was appropriate for it to have been in the cockpit in the first place is neither here nor there in so far as my original question.
Question was (and I trust this was considered by the BoI/Manufacturer etc and hope that it's not considered stupid by the learned audience present) why was, what is in hindsight an obvious pinch point between the seat arm and the control stick ever allowed to exist in the first place when it could have so easily been designed out?
Lets be honest here, there's probably more items than a loose camera being brought into a cockpit that have a far more valid reason to be there and could have accidently got jammed in the same place with similar consequences.