Originally Posted by wjcandee

I'm telling you. You guys should be writing your congressional representatives and telling them how much less safe the troops are on Atlas because of the recent bout of incompetent hires and inadequately-trained hires. The lowering of standards has an effect, and you can predict to your Congressman that when the NTSB issues its final report on the Houston accident, it is going to raise serious questions about these issues. It shouldn't take 300 + dead troops for AMC to stand Atlas down or at least insist that it address the quality and training issue. It's a legitimate concern, and instead of doing ineffective crap like the union targeting Bezos with dumb banners, you guys can take individual action that might actually accomplish something. Me, I notice the over-ocean incidents, the bending of the aircraft at PSM, the dramatic reduction in OE requirements, a zillion anecdotal "Almosts", and Houston. The rising tide of this stuff is the canary in the coal mine, and for goodness' sake Atlas actually had a fatal hull loss. Fatal hull losses at Part 121 carriers are so rare that they are statistically-insignificant predictors of "safety" (i.e. you can't say, "Well, we've never had an actual accident." That can't be the standard.) But once you have one, it can indicate something very important.

And one other thought about Houston that is relevant here. We all know whose apparent conduct I am referring to, and I have been concerned by how the discussion about it has been framed. I think it's relevant to our discussion here that one could say that the person involved wasn't a bad person or pilot in any way, but one might say that in that moment, the person was in over that particular person's head and maybe with better training or more experience might have reacted differently (and of course maybe not), but that it's a fair deduction that maybe that person was not ready to be where they were on that day. And like I say, that's relevant to what we're discussing here.

If the generals are pushed into a serious reevaluation of Atlas as a contractor, it is going to have to take steps to address the issue. Way back when, I think I was a one-man band writing letters to try to get AMC to re-evaluate Tower. They finally did, and I'm sure my activities had almost nothing to do with it, but when they did they pulled the plug.