Geoff Kidd wrote:
I suggest that the main question for the GFA Board and the Management is
something like "What is in the best way to build a safety conscious culture
in the interests of all of our members" and I say that regular factual
reporting is a good way to do that.
See, this is the problem with having discussions like this on mailing lists.
Mailing lists tend to favour people who argue their point of view in a
vacuum, without considering any counterpoints.
I've already described a couple of reasons why "regular factual reporting"
of the kind you've proposed is bad. To whit:
- It discourages people who are "sensitive" about humiliation from
reporting accidents/incidents in the first place;
- It relies on people getting hurt or killed to get its point across;
- It adds responsibility for extra workload to people who are volunteering
their time, and who probably don't appreciate having their spare time
eaten up on the insistence of other people who aren't volunteering theirs;
- It doesn't provide any deeper insight into safety than could be achieved
by writing about precisely the same issues without having to wait for an
accident to occur.
"In the real world," those counterpoints would be addressed and incorporated
into any proposal that was finally delivered. On a mailing list on the
Internet, though, someone like you is perfectly free to pretend they've
never seen any of those points, and blithely continue with their original
crusade without making a single iota of modification to their course.
Seriously, Geoff, we might as well have never had the discussion, because
it hasn't influenced your conclusion at all, has it? You certainly haven't
responded to any of those points in any meaningful way, so as far as I can
see you've totally ignored them.
I think that attitude is intellectually irresponsible. I'm pretty sure
that the ops panel will agree with that conclusion and reject your proposal;
and when they do you'll probably feel disenfrancised just like Robert H
does, even though the rejection of your proposal will have nothing to do
with the intransigence of the ops panel and everything to do with the fact
that the proposal never had legs in the first place because you refused
to address the significant, serious deficiencies outlined in the four points
above.
It is my contention that it is not correct management to say that Accident
and Incident Reporting should not be done because we are too busy at the
moment.
You've just erected a straw man. Nobody has suggested that accident and
incident reporting shouldn't be done. The argument has been that accident
and incident *publication* shouldn't be done, because publication is actively
harmful to the safety management culture you're trying to inspire.
What do you have to say in response to that? How do you address the
four points I"ve raised above? Or are you completely ignoring them and
hoping that the change you want will go through anyway and damn the
consequences?
There appears to be an underlying theme from some who have posted on this
thread that they have heard it all before, all of these lessons are known, so
why doesn't someone just write a theoretical article or example about it.
There are three points I would like to respond to this:
1 A real example is much more sobering and forceful than theory.
It is? Why? If that's true, why has ATSB removed its accident reports from
Flight Safety Australia? Can you name any other aviation magazines across
the world which publish accident reports? Can you name any other aviation
organization anywhere in the world which doesn't have a formal accident
investigation capability but which publishes accident reports anyway?
2 As a relatively new pilot involved in Cross-Country I want to know what
real world mistakes others have made and I want to be able to learn from
those.
As a new pilot involved in Cross Country, do you believe that you're
incapable of learning about safety unless your lesson has blood dripping
from it?
I like to think that my fellow pilots aren't so stupid that the only
lessons they can learn are the ones which have killed or injured people.
Maybe you have a different view of your peers; If so, please tell the
rest of us where you fly so that we can avoid that part of the country.
3 It is clear that there are a number of experienced Instructors who still
make fundamental mistakes or allow their students to make them, and I quote
the couple of examples that are used at the Safety Seminar ..... so even if
those that have heard it all before (and say that they don't need to hear it
again) can, by way of example, fly past a perfectly good runway in the
circuit to get low and land short/heavily damage an aircraft, newer members
need to know about this example and be aware that they too are likely to be
tempted to do the same at some time in their flying ..... and it obviously
won't hurt Instructors to hear it again either.
Do you believe publication of accident reports in the magazine will solve
that problem?
If it doesn't solve that problem, how will you fix the inevitable decline
in accident reports caused by the fact that those who are embarrassed about
reporting their accidents will refuse to do so when they know it's going to
get plastered all over the magazine? You'll have reduced the efficacy of
the existing accident/incident reporting system for no good reason, won't you?
Re your 2nd last paragraph, having attended the Safety Seminar in Wagga
recently, I wonder if the CTOO really does disagree .... and I say that if it
is worth travelling around the country to present those very worthwhile
Seminars, then it is certainly worthwhile reinforcing them in the Magazine.
Perhaps you ought to ask the CTOO about that. He has an email address,
and he has forthright opinions. He'll tell you exactly what he thinks
about this if you ask him the question. He just doesn't want to post
it to a mailing list (largely because dicussions on mailing lists tend to
be inherently useless for providing any useful real-world benefit to anyone,
as this one appears to have demonstrated)
Mark said "Is there -really- anything new to learn that we don't already know
.....?" and I say that the answer is a definite YES. Mark may not have
anything new that he needs to learn (how good would that be?), but I reckon
that every newer member, and every other member with less than say 20,000
gliding hours, can learn a lot from well written real world examples of where
his/her peers have made mistakes.
... and are those self-same pilots so dim that they can't learn from
non-real-world examples?
Ground them, I say. We don't need pilots like that cluttering up the airspace
and presenting a risk to the rest of us.
Taking the example from the Safety Seminar, if you had asked the
Instructor "Do you need a refresher on circuit heights and procedures" before
you fly today, I would be sure he would have said something like "Is there
-really- anything new to learn that we don't already know .....?", yet the
fundamental accident still happened.
Which means that the accidents *AREN'T* being caused by lack of knowledge.
In light of those kinds of suggestions, I'm having difficulty understanding
why you think publication of accident reports will make a difference.
The pilots who have accidents *ALWAYS* understand how not to have them.
Every pilot has been taught how to land safely, taught how to avoid spins,
taught how to lock their canopies, taught how to look-out, etc.
We're not dealing with a problem which is caused by lack of knowledge,
lack of competence, or lack of awareness. The causes run deeper than that.
And I think you're trying to apply an overly simplistic solution to them.
- mark
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I tried an internal modem, [EMAIL PROTECTED]
but it hurt when I walked. Mark Newton
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