Originally posted by TeeVee
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I'm an advocate of serious heavy punishment in cases where people KNOWINGLY deceive or practice incompetence. In the case of a pilot who knows he is too tired, but because of the airlines practices, also knows he may as well resign before if he declares himself unfit to fly. I can't see punishment of the pilot being as productive as prosecution of the airline that KNOWINGLY creates situations that are inherently dangerous, read: criminally negligent.
Coddling is what we do in the airline industry by letting airlines self-regulate to the degree they are at the moment.
Too easy under employment law for a manager to say that they have no evidence, just hearsay, so cannot take direct action against undesirable cockpit performance.
A pilot that makes a mistake and is subsequently honest about it should not necessarily earn punishment depending on what the consequences are. A pilot that knowingly acts to hide that mistake should face disciplinary action. If they are in real terms actively endangering lives, then there is, imo, a strong case for them to be strung up by the balls in a dungeon.
My point is that airlines can easily, and legally evade the higher cost of preemptive action as they do not have 'enough' evidence of poor performance that may lead to an accident. At the moment, people who speak up, are removed from the operation, or in my case have no alternative than to resign having exhausted all possible reporting avenues which included confronting senior management and authorities... the answer was always the same... we don't see any smoking holes as a result of the issues you have raised, we therefore deem it safe!!!!
This is the report of a 737 that only just made it after the oil caps were left off after routine maintenance. The report basically determined that the airline failed to monitor a safety sensitive procedure and created a situation where untrained personnel were 'forced' to do jobs they were not qualified or trained to do. Were they prosecuted, or even fined... NO! They were later asked if they had rectified this and on trust, the CAA accepted the airlines answer that they had carried out the AAIB recommendations!!!
5 years later, the same airline continued to do the same thing with the same risks in a number of areas of operation.
I don't think engineers should be punished as much as the individuals in the airline that continued to knowingly 'create' these situations fully expecting that the line employees will take do the jail time when something actually goes wrong.
What I am talking about is a controlled way of monitoring practices, procedures and performance in order to preemptively take action, to actually prevent accidents BEFORE they happen. And yes, SERIOUS punishment to those that WILLINGLY fail to act or use deception to cover the fact that airlines are not fully supporting individual employees in regards to safe opts.
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