Originally Posted by DC8DRIVER

We are so impressed and proud of you! Good job with all the emergencies and the 38 glorious years of perfect performance in your aviation career. The rest of are clearly not perfect like you.

Perhaps this thread should be left to those of us who are human and believe themselves to be fallible and wish to learn from the mistakes of others while not passing judgement and condemnation on our fellow pilots when they are down.



It sounds to me that your idea of CRM/TRM/TEM is to fix the blame on your fellow crew member and not fix the problem as you are clearly fixing the blame on the Atlas pilots while not having anything constructive to say. What you are saying is really "THEY DIDN'T DO THINGS PERFECTLY, SO THEY SCREWED UP" and then go on to recite all of the things they did incorrectly. Thank you Captain Obvious: We all know WHAT happened.

The real question should be "WHY did this happen?" The answer to why is not "they didn't follow the procedure". The real answer will be found when we can say WHY they didn't follow the procedure.

While your state of perfection is admirable, I doubt that it truly exists. Have you NEVER made a mistake in the cockpit? Honestly? Never missed a radio call? Never read back a clearance incorrectly? Never deviated from SOP's or FAR's, ever? Never been under MDA? Never overshot a vector onto a LOC? All have the potential for trouble and all are in your book.

No I am not splitting hairs here, I am pointing out that there are only degrees of mistakes and there exists an enormous grey area between unobtainable absolute perfection and a newsworthy incident. You have never landed off centerline? I doubt it and yet I defy you to come up with an absolute number of feet off of a runway centerline that is unacceptable. Same goes for landing short or long of the touchdown zone. While we all (at least I) strive to hit the centerline in the middle of the touchdown zone on every landing, I will admit that I am off a few inches every now and then. I get away with this because the runways we typically use are long and wide, but I strive for perfection because on rare occasions, we do fly into short or narrow strips where a long or wide landing would be bad. I strive for perfection because I know I will never attain it but the effort makes me a safer pilot.

More than your unconstructive additions to this discussion, your belief in your own infallibility points to the out-of-date and dangerous mindset that you could not possibly ever do anything wrong because you "follow the book". It's not "the book" that I take issue with. It is the human that follows the book (if he is honest with himself) will fail to perform the duties in that book perfectly, every time, for their entire career.

The realization of this human limitation, and the desire to reduce it to the greatest possible degree, is what makes a pilot a professional, and a captain a worthy leader.

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