Safety Culture at Middle Eastern Carriers

typhoonpilot said:
No question that having unions to protect pilots when they make mistakes is good for the pilots, but a 100% correlation between safety and unionism like Seggy is inferring is not correct.
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Seggy has not implied* that, actually. He has stated that a union makes an airline safer, not that a unionized airline will always be safer by every metric than a non-union airline. Sometimes there is a rare non-union airline whose management creates a great safety culture, while a unionized airline has a union that has to fight non-stop to make the carrier safe while management cuts corners left and right. But, and this is the important part, every airline will always be safer with a union than it would be without, because it provides protection for a pilot who needs to blow the whistle.

In fact, I might argue that having too strong of a union can keep incompetent pilots employed when they are a risk to the airline.
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Complete myth. I represented hundreds of pilots during my union career, and yes, a few of them were flat out dangerous. I represented them to the absolute best of my ability, because that was my job. You know what happened to them? They got fired because they deserved to be fired, and there was nothing I could do to stop it. Because the system works.

It can also result in seniority based upgrades of pilots who are not ready or capable of the position.
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Wrong again. The job of the training department is to ensure that this does not happen, and no union contract prevents a training department from doing that necessary job. A union seniority number only gives you a chance at upgrade. It doesn't give you an upgrade. Only performance can do that.

* A listener infers; a speaker implies
 
Seggy said:
Let us talk about that some more. The pilot of that flight, slept what, about 3 or 4 hours 24 hours prior to the accident? This of course, after flying 99 hours the previous month. Have the scheduling practices at Emirates changed since then? So wouldn't pilots be prone to procedural errors being so fatigued? Looks like there may have been more!

http://www.news.com.au/travel/trave...-highly-probable/story-e6frfq80-1225707342621

Wouldn't a company with a just safety culture have kept them on and look at the system that caused the mistakes? Wait a second, Emirates DID change some procedures after the incident in Melbourne, didn't they? So why didn't they keep the pilots on then?
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He said he didn't agree with their termination/resignation.

It would have been beneficial to have a union in this case though and I agree with that.
 
Seggy said:
I saw that.

Why were they asked to resign though if there truly is an open culture there especially if fatigue may have played a factor?

How does fatigue and the culture play a factor in this accident in Miami?
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Because they don't have BB or RW as their reps. :)
 
Already answered Seggy.

I did not agree with the decision to force them to resign. Pretty much nobody in the airline except the President and EVP of Operations agreed with the decision.

What you are missing here though is a crucial difference in the way U.S. majors compute takeoff performance and the way most of the rest of the world does it. Major U.S. carriers have central load planning take care of it and send them the "numbers". The pilots have been taken out of that process other than to crosscheck and enter some of the data. That was mandated by the FAA over 25 years ago due to too many pilot errors in the process.

At many foreign airlines pilots are integral in the process of determining the final fuel load after receiving the final zero fuel weight. They then calculate the takeoff weight and enter it into the OPT. The result is then entered into the FMC. There are multiple chances for errors in that process that U.S. major pilots never have to deal with.



TP
 
typhoonpilot said:
Already answered Seggy.

I did not agree with the decision to force them to resign. Pretty much nobody in the airline except the President and EVP of Operations agreed with the decision.

What you are missing here though is a crucial difference in the way U.S. majors compute takeoff performance and the way most of the rest of the world does it. Major U.S. carriers have central load planning take care of it and send them the "numbers". The pilots have been taken out of that process other than to crosscheck and enter some of the data. That was mandated by the FAA over 25 years ago due to too many pilot errors in the process.

At many foreign airlines pilots are integral in the process of determining the final fuel load after receiving the final zero fuel weight. They then calculate the takeoff weight and enter it into the OPT. The result is then entered into the FMC. There are multiple chances for errors in that process that U.S. major pilots never have to deal with.



TP
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So there is a systemic problem, yet the pilots are fired. Gotcha.
 
typhoonpilot said:
If you are speaking of the Melbourne incident there were 4 pilots in the flight deck, two were forced to resign. They were the operating crew in the seats.

There was some lack of procedural accuracy on their part.

I did not agree with the decision.

No question that having unions to protect pilots when they make mistakes is good for the pilots, but a 100% correlation between safety and unionism like Seggy is inferring is not correct.

In fact, I might argue that having too strong of a union can keep incompetent pilots employed when they are a risk to the airline. It can also result in seniority based upgrades of pilots who are not ready or capable of the position.


TP
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This is also a good point.
 
Seggy said:
Well, sometimes you have to think outside of procedures and be an aviator. Such as if you suspect damage from ripping off some lights at the end of the runway. There may not be an EICAS for that depending on where you hit them.
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Agreed. Airmanship. All roads lead back to it at one time or another.

Seggy said:
It is like comparing apples and lumber.
There are no checklists for hitting runway lights.
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Some aircraft may or may not have a checklist item for structural damage / controllability check. But many training manuals will often have an expanded procedure, or at least expanded discussion on this, sometimes labled similarly as damage assessment / airplane handling evaluation, or similar.

That's where something like hitting runway lights I would see falling under.
 
MikeD said:
But many training manuals will often have an expanded procedure, or at least expanded discussion on this, sometimes labled similarly as damage assessment / airplane handling evaluation, or similar.

That's where something like hitting runway lights I would see falling under.
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The four aircraft I have type ratings for don't have anything like this.
 
typhoonpilot said:
Already answered Seggy.

I did not agree with the decision to force them to resign. Pretty much nobody in the airline except the President and EVP of Operations agreed with the decision.

What you are missing here though is a crucial difference in the way U.S. majors compute takeoff performance and the way most of the rest of the world does it. Major U.S. carriers have central load planning take care of it and send them the "numbers". The pilots have been taken out of that process other than to crosscheck and enter some of the data. That was mandated by the FAA over 25 years ago due to too many pilot errors in the process.

At many foreign airlines pilots are integral in the process of determining the final fuel load after receiving the final zero fuel weight. They then calculate the takeoff weight and enter it into the OPT. The result is then entered into the FMC. There are multiple chances for errors in that process that U.S. major pilots never have to deal with.



TP
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XJT pilots were running their own takeoff performance numbers and spinning a wiz wheel as late as 2010.
 
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