PPRuNe Forums - View Single Post - Near miss with 5 airliners waiting for T/O on taxiway "C" in SFO!
Old 16th Jul 2017, 00:59
  #249 (permalink)  
WillowRun 6-3
 
Join Date: Jul 2013
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No one asserted pilot incompetence

Originally Posted by Chuck Canuck
I don't agree with Kal 100% but after rereading the EVA LAX near CFIT incident, I sympathise with non-Western pilots who are almost always painted as incompetent by a broad brush.
Let's back up. Kal's assertion was made in context of carriers, not individual pilots. Reply I posted likewise was completely in context of carriers, also - not individual pilots.
The facts are pretty easy to discern. Without scorn or racist overtones, and also without accusations of incompetence on the part of any pilot involved in any given incident, the overall system of a good many countries all over the world - not just outside a conventional concept of the West - have deficiencies in their NAS, or pilot qualification or recurrent training, or operational methods. Although it speaks blandly the ICAO USOAP - Universal Safety Oversight Audit Programme - provides massive increments of data to this effect in the specific context of safety oversight systems (https://www.icao.int/safety/CMAForum/Pages/default.aspx).
It is not about individual aviators. The Asiana pilots in the SFO incident would have checked out, individually, very highly in the simulator, would they not? But despite their skills and abilities, the system within which they operated left something to be desired. The system deserves to be painted with the brush it has earned.
Traveling out of Tokyo Narita to New York on JAL a couple of years ago, a JAL flight crew were having breakfast near my table at the airport hotel. As crisp, precise, and polished looking crew as I ever have seen. Maybe the Japanese cultural imperatives for respect for seniority and hierarchy, and in general, and a kind of immediacy in response to stimuli, at times can be superior to standard Americana/Brit attitudes?
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