Performance management
 

Hi guys,
Quick question for you Captains: How do you manage performance on board your aircraft? Do you usually prefer to take the informal route and have a chat with the crew concerned or do you always make it official by that I mean, do you report it in writing? If you were to report poor performance in writing, what are the tools at your disposal to do so? Thanks for your input.

There's no single answer for this one. Minor annoyances and transgressions can sometimes be ignored altogether. Major ones have to be addressed. Methods available might be the informal debrief in the bar but more official action could be offloading of the offender, cancellation of flight, inflight demotion, verbal warning followed by written (electronic) flight report, email etc. The difficult bit is dealing with the 'grey' areas. Do you start adding to the weight of somebody's personnel file for "minor" things? If someone is having a "bad day" should they, are you going to make them pay a visit to the office? Typically, cabin crew are poorly represented by unions and their managers are some of the most vindictive people imaginable who will ruin a person's promotion prospects for the most minor of reasons.

PM

A changing vocabulary: "Performance"
 

Ah, "performance": With the increased interest in HUMAN FACTORS during the past few decades, one wonders about the profession of a "Performance Engineer", or the focus of the investigation's "Performance Group". Most of us still think of "performance" as related to an engineering-specialty. About two decades ago I first noticed many younger pilots mentioning "performance", unrelated to the traditional usage.

Thank you for taking the time to reply to me Piltdown man.
IGh I don't really understand the relevance of your post but thank you for posting anyway.

First question was
"... How do you manage performance on ... aircraft?..."
Next comment:
"... I don't ... understand the relevance ..."

Boeing first certified a "Performance Management System" on the B747 in 1981 [the Delco PMS was the first "box" to coordinate Pitch, Thrust, and Navigation; due to the planned roll-out of B767 with Sperry FMS, the Delco product had been re-named "PMS", reserving the "FMS" label for the newer Sperry product].

For T/O and Landing, Performance Engineers have provided charts & graphs: pilots often use these charts prior to T/O or Landing. For Climb, CRZ, DES, "Performance" Engineers supplied pages and pages of data, for best "performance": LOTS of DATA, for various GWt, Spds, Altitudes, winds, temps, sfc, &ct.

Then, and since, "performance" has never seemed related to Human Factors -- until those HF-guys started the new vocabulary employing the high sounding phrase
"HUMAN PERFORMANCE GROUP"
[maybe "human factors" didn't seem sufficiently scientific].

So, the HF-guys' new usage of the old word "Performance", is as corny as Boeing's suddenly re-christening the Delco Flt Management System.