Safety Job One?

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09-01-2009, 11:45 AM

#11

Mesabah

:-)

Joined APC: Feb 2007

Posts: 7,339

Yes these statistics don't tell the whole story. It counts Sully's Hudson river landing as the same as Colgan 3407.

09-04-2009, 09:07 PM

#12

Boogie Nights

Gets Weekends Off

Thread Starter

Joined APC: Oct 2006

Position: KC135 IP

Posts: 398

Airtran FOQA

Quote:

Originally Posted by III Corps

We are all striving for a safe operation, especially if one has a front row seat.

I hope you also have a FOQA up and running. ASAPs are fine but they tend to be subjective and either over or under-represent the actufal situation (not necessarily by intent).

We all know that there are daily incidents which are inches away from 1) not occurring or 2) becoming an accident. And most of that either goes unreported, especially if there is no FOQA. As Matthews at Flight Safety said, (paraphrase), 'Before FOQA we really had no clue as to what daily ops were like."

I would take such a survey with a grain of salt as the needle is constantly moving and statistically things can change dramatically quickly. Prior to Concorde going down at CDG, it has the BEST safety record of any airliner and with one fatal crash, it went to worst.

We do have FOQA. We are allowed as the pilot group to police ourselves and say "What the F@@@" if someone is doing stupid stuff. We get quite a bit of feedback from it. I gather it reveals some otherwise unknown baffoonery. As an newer FO, you never know what to expect when you fly with a captain you have never flown with before. 99% are sharp and professional. It is the 1% who give you pause. There was one (who was fired) I definitely had to say whoa to. He was in a hurry, skipped through checklist, and had lots of guys complain about him. He wanted me to land with a 10 knot tailwind on a 6500' (KERI) runway to save time. No reason no need. It was the first time I had to tell a captain NO. The stupid part was we would have had to back taxi the length of the field. It would have saved no time and only put the aircraft at risk. Oddly what got him fired was baffoonery outside of the cockpit.

As to the guys who were recently fired at our company, I would still like to know the details. I suspect it was a tit for tat on the companies part. Like I said 99% of guys are sharp professionals.