Epic post alert: Where a Dash 8 Captain Explains a thing or three.
By now, CessnaFlyer has received my personal apology via PM. I went ballistic on him, and that is true. What else is true is that it was warranted- the apology was to which degree I took it- but I was right. Here's why.
Regional pilots are under intense scrutiny right now. The facts of the hiring frenzy versus experience, the Sully Event, the notion of competence versus experience divided by being human, and toss in what appears to be the darkest corner of professional pilots' reality with the Colgan crash all make me a bit 'tetchy'.
We can very easily point fingers and either give approval or reproach to any given incident. Who can do such a thing with a bit of authenticity, however, is a totally different story. We've all seen the puke inducing "Don't wish them good judgment, Martha" piffle that the King's spew- even though it is utterly true in its totally cornball delivery. This is a backdrop on which I explain...
When you are sitting in what I call the "high chair," you finally understand what the CVR is. It is your epitaph. It is designed to give airline management and the investigators an ILS straight to your competence- regardless of circumstance. Either you win, or you lose big. The checklist? While writ in blood line by line, it is also risk management. Not flight-deck risk management, but exposure to lawsuit risk management. The cynical truth is also a fact. It is designed to hang you. Some way, some how, your arse is on the line, because... oddly... we're human. We're crazily prone to mistakes.
Imagine the myriad ways you have violated sterile cockpit, and project any one of them into a crash.... and you'll see what I mean.
Sure, there are blatant violations of all kinds happening every second a plane is in the sky. Whoopdee doo. But it ain't raining Cessnas, now is it? Do the math, and understand that the one day you have a class 10 cockup up front might not end happily. Would you want folks petitioning the gov't under the FOIA to hear your last words?
Oh, "that" will never happen? Because I read or heard something somewhere, and being a diligent and conscientious pilot will erase that from the possible bad days I may have within 25K hours of flying?
Bollocks. It damned certainly will. Especially because "It will never happen" isn't part of a serious pilot's vocab. And the second it becomes part of a pilot's lexicon, the probability of any number of things happening just went up by infinity.
I can NOT, will NOT, shall NOT, and NEVER tolerate any mode of thought expressed to or near me that puts one above statistics. I go utterly King Kong Feces when that happens. We have... a word I completely hate... 'procedures,' but working against those p-words are a trillion different factors related to being Homo Sapiens. So it goes, and it shall not be forgotten or overlooked. It sure as hell will never be trained away. It is built in to the truly 'professional' (another word I hate) pilot. To them it is known that safety is more luck than... procedure... in this biz, because luck is stacked against us. And who wants to really delve into that abyss? Nobody.
Colgan, the crew involved, their friends, their families, their passengers... Mega damned grim, kids. Very, very bad day. No good news to be seen anywhere regarding it thus far. And when I bitch-slapped the FO for his disgustingly short-sighted, pathetic view on how my brethren and sistren met their fate, he had teeth marks in his arse for a good reason.
It is a dark game, flying planes. We're cheating death, a billion unseen holes in the picture that may or may not one by one show themselves, we're fighting public perception, and dammit... we're having a blast doing it.
That's the final line. We're doing it because we love it. It takes a large measure of humanity to love the engaging part of this job, but as such, we're gonna make mistakes. If we're lucky, we'll be able to tell our grandkids about it, or tell CFIs about it, or bitch-slap FOs about it, or type about it.
The fourth stripe is very heavy, lads. Your SA goes up by a factor of 1000. This is only a tiny bit of why.
-SIG