Elevation

Our accident was not inevitable. There were things we could have done when we saw hiring norms change. We didn't do that in large part to a toxic culture within and between organizations here.

ABX has been very safe for over ten years. Within ATSG holdings you have the knowledge and capacity to avert disaster.

Many of us have been pretty vocal in laying out our safety and training deficiencies here. So you can feel free to parse signal from noise there.

Finally, if you think a disaster is on the horizon, averting tragedy is a campaign not a single effort. You'll need a team of motivated nerds, one willing to be an agitator and one willing to get necessary movement across a finish line. Connect with you allies and survey the corporate will to recognize the problems before you. Expect setbacks. Persevere.

There is nothing inevitable. You can avoid our deadly outcomes.

vnavpth

Neither ABX or ATI are in the habit of letting grossly incompetent pilots operate their aircraft from what I’ve seen. Just postulating that a “lot of hiring is going on” will lead to accidents is is ridiculous. In my opinion, neither was Altas. It’s very unfortunate, but to label all HR departments the same. Had the training captains and check-airmen at Atlas not been ignored maybe this wouldn’t have happened.

OffAtTango

Any insight on when ATI will be hiring again?

wjcandee

A statement like this is very unfortunate and inappropriate in any forum in which ABX Air folks are commenting.

Stating actual verifiable facts that debunk the overheated mudslinging from the ABX guys simply isn't proper here.

wjcandee

And had his prior employers listened to their people, and had they not allowed him to sneak around having a reportable event, he never would have been hired at Atlas, even though they were jonesing for diversity. The other problem was that this was obviously a very-intelligent, articulate guy, who could talk a very good game, which gave credence to his victim-of-discrimination rap. And his apparent-inadequacies weren't apparent until he was put in a stressful situation and fell behind the airplane (or, worse, vapor-locked). Reading what's come out of the NTSB, it appears that he could tell you exactly what he planned to do, and what he planned to do was absolutely-correct. In a stressful situation, he just had repeated difficulties executing it. That's a big difference from somebody who doesn't know the aircraft systems or the procedures or whatever, in that the second is much easier to weed out than the former.

There was plenty of finger-crossing and buck-passing here. I have to believe that the incident will give cover to more people who want to "out" what probably-few folks there are out there that would fall into a category like his, and would make them realize that it's their flat-out obligation to do so, regardless of how hard management may resist.

Too many people and organizations are afraid of lawsuits and bend their conduct, contrary to doing the right thing, to avoid those lawsuits. The right answer is to make sure your EPLI insurance is paid up, do the right thing, and testify in the lawsuit if you have to. Frankly, in this case, the previous-employers' people had documentation out the butt, that they had saved on their own, about how dangerous this pilot was. I'm sure they now recognize that if you find yourself doing that, you really can't just sit on your hands -- you have an obligation to push for the result, even if higher-ups don't want to hear it. There are plenty of channels one could reach out to (e.g. FAA), that would let one sleep better at night, and let's hope that folks realize that that, in the long run, is going to be the safer path.

nitefr8dog

Funny.. .....

goinaround

He ain't wrong....

Jurassic Jet

False. One had zero 75/76 time other than a few months in the right seat before he upgraded.

Elevation

Very good points. Please excuse me while I add to them.

It's true some information was concealed. We did have sufficient data from the previous employers, though. We had training records showing failures from a previous company. They were sitting in DB's email inbox. We simply didn't read them despite reading those same records from the same airline for hundreds of other pilots. So while he concealed some data, we ignored some pretty big indicators which we did recieve. DB simply didn't pass the info. This is detailed painfully in the interview transcripts.

As for the guy being articulate and catching people by surprise, that wasn't true for everyone. Reports had been filed prior to the accident, but we didn't react to them. Also he failed events here. Multiple times. A big part of letting the guy slide was that he was likeable. We all like seeing likeable underdogs win. This is why the world's con-artists are likeable, nice guys. It's camofluage. It works.

Elevation

Also, we're kinda drifting away from ATI interview info. My fault. I'll stop.