crew conflict
 

CRM is great, but I'm sure that a lot of times you'll fly with another pilot that does not apply the concepts and this will end up in a personal conflict. How do resolve this?

If you know CRM then by all means you should avoid a personal conflict.Do your job,keep quiet and monitor the flight. Safety should be your first concern,and in any case avoid wrestling over the controls. A calm ,neutral tone combined with pertinent remarks will be your best asset.I'ts not easy all the times,especially if you are a young FO.
The CRM tells that the worst possible combination is a hard ,tough captain combined with a shy,introverted FO.Avoid beeing like this by knowing very well what your value is.Do not try ,though,to prove your qualities to one another.
All the best.Safe flight
Alex

Crew Conflict
 

Johnman,

If you're a copilot, you've got the toughest job on the airline...being all things to all captains. Here's the deal: SOP's are the best friend a copilot ever had. Learn them and adhere to them until you have a very good reason not to. In matters of standardization and legality, stick to "The Book" as best you can even if His Eminence isn't. As Alexban said, smile and speak softly...be professional. In matters of safety ( your life is about to flash before your eyes ), there are no rules for this; do what you must to fly another day and worry about sorting it out later. You will look very good at the hearing.

It is a nice subject to be raised, and we always learn from each other, We have many wise knowledgeable pilots and we have the ones that they think they know, those are flying for the prestige or the money, or they have different kinds of problems like addiction to smoking or drinking where there is no room for, and here you face mood changes, withdrawal symptoms and invention of ideas that are not in accordance with SOP or airmanship.

Punch them in the head. :E

Oh sorry, that was last century's method.
If you just don't get on with the other person then you just keep it professional, don't withdraw support and silently count down the hours and minutes till you can sign off and go home.
If there's an SOP drama then you as an FO have to use all the tact and character you have to keep it on course. If what the captain is doing is safe but not SOP then polite questions when appropriate is fine and it's possible to learn stuff. If the SOP deviation is dangerous then you must say something.
Imagine how you'd like to be spoken to. If you were doing something wrong would you want to be corrected by some one barking at you or gently asking a guided question? (Naturally, if lives are at stake, best do it quickly)

CRM does not solve personality conflicts, it helps to accommodate them during flight. And during layovers one is not required to socialize. Cockpit protocol is according to SOPs (Standard Operating Procedures), and intra cockpit communications can be confined to the business of flight. :(

SOP is the heart of any complex operation and safety always comes first. I guess the right answer to the personality conflict could be a more thorough medical check for the persons concerned to evaluate them mentally. Do you feel that would help?

JMan,

You work for the government, right ???

Nearly all of my professional flying has been with foreign aircarriers, as a direct entry Captain/Training Captain.

ALL of these aircarriers used direct entry LHS guys from many different companies, most of which had similar...but also sometimes quite different operating procedures.
They were all current on type, with lots of experience therein.

However, found it sometimes was quite a chore to get these Captains to adapt to the present company procedures.
Was often met with the phrase...'well, we didn't do it that way in xxxx...'.
Clearly, this is hardly the point.
The young First Officers expect things to be done a certain way, and are often confused (and upset) when the aren't...with, IMO, good reason. They don't KNOW any other way, because they are NEW guys.

These DE Captains (and indeed Captains that have been there awhile) have a duty and responsibility to at least try to 'do it by the book'...if for no other reason than it makes for a smoother flight, for all concerned.

Of course, a few may run into a 'wiseguy' First Officer, but this seldom happens.
And if it does, a word with the Fleet Manager usually will fix this.

Dear 411A,

What happened to my 727 interview???forgot about me:-(
By the way im flying a sexy jet now and Capts are great...

Regards,

M.85

Try some the many references here:
http://www.mapnp.org/library/intrpsnl/conflict.htm
Start with “Basics of Conflict Management”.
Beware that many of the concepts in this site are US orientated; I suspect that the experts will tell you that conflict also involves national, organizational and personal cultures.

There may also be something on conflict in this Leadership site:
http://www.nwlink.com/~donclark/leader/leader.html

Do you ever get the feeling that it's the guys who most need to know about CRM who are the most resistant to it, and vice versa?

It's very difficult to "learn" to be a team player, and even more so if you think CRM is a big waste of time. You always get some pilots talking about CRM being "touchy feely tree-hugging nonsense" when in many cases it could and does save lives.

Still this attitude can be pretty funny sometimes:- my favourite anecdote was a Virgin Atlantic TC in the sim with the head of CRM supervising. His first remark to the copilot was "CRM - this is the Cockpit, your the Resource, and I'm the Management". Later in the detail they get an eng failure - he turns to the flight eng and says "[Name], I love you and want to have your babies. That's enough CRM, now put the f***ing fire out!"

Good experience, sound judgment, system knowledge, complying with rules and regulation, cockpit discipline, healthy attitude, and airmanship are all factors important to the safety of any flight. CRM was introduced and is a real necessity on today’s flying environment, the rejection by some is due to weakness at a certain aspect in aviation or due to poor cockpit management, all of us met good, average, and above average pilots and we all know that performance vary from day to day, that’s why we need to work as a team, the cockpit is a sacred area and should have people with a high level of integrity.

Each thread is a little too developed to merge them but a look here may be relevant to some of the above discussion.

You have 3 sort of crew member to fly with:
With one group you can fly......
with one group you like to fly..
with the last you MUST fly.......

It is not allways easy to handle the ego of your partners in the
flight deck. But as all pilots are humans there is not allways the
same "chemistry" in the air. In the last case stay to the book and
fly to the company set standart. If I hear from DE`s "In my last
Airline this was better and that was better" then I ask them why
did you left that outfit? That is the same as you are divorced and
allways talk from the one you left behind and crossed not the
bridge into the next adventure yet.

NG

Johnman, you're being too analytical. Relax, chill out and remember that the chances of anyone on your flight deck ever doing something so wrong such that you will be slightly injured, let alone die, are very very slim.