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Air India down


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There will be lots of active discussions like these over the next 5 to 10 years or so once the rash of Low Wage Carriers come to fruition.

Perhaps old fashioned pilots who have test pilot experience, multiple APTL's and air demontration experience will then be more appreciated later on in North America.

At the moment only China seems to appreciate and understand that..or at least the aviation insurance industry does.

Lessons forgotten or ignored have to be learned again.

Dork

Per Ardua...Cumulo Granitus

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DEFCON, I suspect we agree even on that.

Re "He told me this FO was in fact one of the better ones. He went on to suggest most really didn’t have much of a clue because they had moved up through their new careers at a pace which exceeded their experience and understanding?", and Dork, re, "There will be lots of active discussions like these over the next 5 to 10 years or so once the rash of Low Wage Carriers come to fruition."

The airline industry itself...not necessarily the operations people (although operations people still aren't safety people), but the financial people, executive leaders who know more about marketing than they do about aviation, and the shareholders have created the circumstances which are slowly resulting in the destruction of standards and professionalism among its aircrews.

Some say that paying a pilot more will not make him or her safer. I agree - that ship has sailed. The key is in making the career attractive to young people so those who will make fine pilots will choose the profession.

You cannot pay a professional airline pilot $16,000 (the Colgan F/O) to $35,000 per year while removing all incentives which normally bring people into the profession, and expect to draw qualified, keen and eager candidates. Your story, DEFCON illustrates perfectly what is meant by this.

It doesn't take much to fly an airplane. September 11th tragically proved that. The mistake is in thinking that a professional pilots' job is to do just that..."fly" the airplane, and nothing could be further from the truth. Saying that is like saying the surgeon's job is to use a scalpel to cut skin and muscle in an operation, or a lawyer's job is to argue before a judge and jury in court or the dentist's job is to drill teeth.

Whether it is the tyranny of the quarterly report or the punishment shareholders offer up to a company which must plan years in advance, not days or months, the outcomes are the same - the inability to charge sufficiently for services rendered, due to false expectations brought about by the deregulation experiment. The first and increasingly the only place from which blood may still be extracted is from employees, because the oil companys, the banks and even the shareholders are in no mood to give. And I don't believe we have hit bottom yet in terms of how low pilot wages can go before passengers themselves recognize that things have changed.

Professional competency is as much about knowing what one doesn't know about one's field as it is judiciously applying what one does know while seeking answers and continuously learning from others. The F/O you mention seems comfortably numb and seems to have permitted others to dictate his level of professionalism. If he was truly as you describe, he should be much better, and should be ashamed of himself to respond as he did. As always, we can fly comfortably for thousands of hours until in one minute we can't.

At the same time, some people simply don't belong in the cockpit of an airliner, and some people don't even belong in an airplane. But, as the pipeline dries up for reasons which should now be well understood, such people, good persons though they may be, are going to end up in places they may very well be unqualified for. Shortened, cheapened training will only exacerbate the problem.

Don

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Thanks DEFCON...a lot of observers are seeing these trends. I'm not averse to change in terms of addressing challenges other than the safety of the industry...thank heaven for change! I am averse to an approach that is slowly fostering competence issues through wrong assumptions, undervalued skill levels, over-reliance on microprocessors and complex solutions in software and the challenge of showing profit while keeping the other two legs of the 3-legged stool fastened on! Humans are unbelievably creative in problem solving and I probably just can't see where the imaginative solutions to these issues is going to come from, but come they will !

Don

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