Lets talk about SOP's

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confusedalot
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Re: Lets talk about SOP's

Post by confusedalot »

As far as SOP changes are concerned, not that big of a deal, at least it should not be.

I have worked for an (as in many) airline(s) and I did a hit and run at transport following a major bankruptcy after 9/11. Went back to industry afterwards.

The airline types get their act together at some point, put in their amendment for acceptance or approval (depending on which TC unit you are dealing with, an SOP should only be an acceptance, a COM is an approval), and then it is returned for dissemination.

It is really not that hard. Bureaucratic inertia (read inefficiency) can however prove to be tedious.
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Re: Lets talk about SOP's

Post by True North »

Rockie,

I know I'm wasting my time, you love to obfuscate but I'll give it one more go.

This all started with this statement from you,

"The key is knowing when adherence to SOP's is required and when it is not."

I asked you for an example of when it is not required and this was your reply,

"Sometimes a poorly written SOP contradicts itself telling you to do something this way on one page, and another way on a different page. Can't help but violate the SOP somewhere in that circumstance."

I then asked you for an example, which you did not give.

I am not talking about "changing" SOPs. There are countless reasons why airlines make changes. I am talking about correcting a mistake in an SOP which your contradicting SOP would certainly qualify as. You would have us believe you had to deal with this problem for some time. I called bullshit and stated why and how an amendment to correct an SOP would be done quickly. You are trying to muddy the waters now by talking about the process used for changing SOPs or developing new ones. They are totally different animals.

Who I have worked for is irrelevant. You can try and dispute what I have said with facts or you can blow some more smoke. Either way, I really don't care anymore.
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Re: Lets talk about SOP's

Post by Rockie »

I’m sorry True North, but I can’t do anything to solve your inability to understand English. Perhaps a night school course...
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Re: Lets talk about SOP's

Post by sanjet »

Lord thunderin Jesus people.... it's just a job like any other, have a beer :drinkers:

Follow sop's, sometimes you do have to think outside the box (turning on APU before reading QRH when you realize you have a dual engine failure over the Hudson...)

Flying is a mix of science and an art.... SOP's have contributed hugely to safely operating an airliner but there is a reason experience is still valued in this industry.


As the saying goes, ask 2 pilots for an opinion, you'll get three.
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Re: Lets talk about SOP's

Post by Cat Driver »

As the saying goes, ask 2 pilots for an opinion, you'll get three.

Actually you will get four if Rockie gets into the mix.
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Re: Lets talk about SOP's

Post by Big Pistons Forever »

True North, Rockie, Cat Driver.

Your exchanges, in my opinion are all about internet point scoring, not constructively addressing the thread topic. Instead of hijacking my thread start your own.....

Back to the topic at hand. Digits, in my opinion brought up an interesting point
I also used to work for a company that had multiple airplanes with different equipment. In one airplane it was impossible to follow the SOPs (something about setting up the radio aids etc).
When I read that I thought of a very near disaster that involved a 737 conducting an approach to Prince George. It was right after PWA bought CP. The approach nav radio set up failed to account for a significant difference in cockpit switchology. The result was the VOR being set instead of the LOC and a very near CFIT disaster. The take away is those simple SOP "variations" that are not documented but everybody uses as a work around, can be the start of the accident chain.

Ultimately the use of SOP's is a reflection of the company culture. I worked for a company were it was understood all those SOP's were only for training and the ride. Once you got on the line the tacit understanding was SOP's were advisory only and Captains could do what ever they thought best.....

This attitude, in my opinion contributed to several bad outcomes.

The bottom line from this pilots perspective:

How you use SOP's is a reflection of your professionalism. I think you have a duty to follow the direction you get from your Ops Manager and CP. If you disagree with that direction rather then ignoring it and doing what you think is right, you should engage management to effect change. If the company has the old school attitude I described above and is impervious to constructive change and tolerates operations in contradictions to their own SOP's then I think you need to evaluate your future with that company.

Finally the ability to safely deviate from the SOP is, in my opinion often heavily dependent on systems knowledge. There is again in my opinion a lack of curiosity in many pilots and an attitude of "if it is something I need to know about, the company will teach it to me." Critical to Sully's success was the immediate understanding of the importance of starting the APU ASAP so there was no systems degradation rather then working the checklist to item 14. This almost instant decision in the face of an shocking and off the charts improbable scenario was a reflection of a pilot that had a deep understanding of how the airplane worked and what needed to done as a reaction to what was happening now.
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Re: Lets talk about SOP's

Post by Rockie »

BPF

You must be a saint (or the atheist equivalent) to keep so calm after all the shit ignorant a**holes throw your direction. I’m patient, but you are amazing. I salute you sir, but you would be forgiven for chopping the knees out from under some of your detractors on occasion.

Give it a shot, it’s enormously satisfying and easy to do.
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Re: Lets talk about SOP's

Post by confusedalot »

sanjet wrote:Lord thunderin Jesus people.... it's just a job like any other, have a beer :drinkers:

Follow sop's, sometimes you do have to think outside the box (turning on APU before reading QRH when you realize you have a dual engine failure over the Hudson...)

Flying is a mix of science and an art.... SOP's have contributed hugely to safely operating an airliner but there is a reason experience is still valued in this industry.


As the saying goes, ask 2 pilots for an opinion, you'll get three.
Aw man, an easy jobs turns into a.....whatever............
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Re: Lets talk about SOP's

Post by Big Pistons Forever »

Rockie wrote:BPF

You must be a saint (or the atheist equivalent) to keep so calm after all the shit ignorant a**holes throw your direction. I’m patient, but you are amazing. I salute you sir, but you would be forgiven for chopping the knees out from under some of your detractors on occasion.
.
I am a long way from a saint as many who know me will attest :lol:

I am nearing the end of my flying career, and when I look back there were many experienced pilots who took the time to give me good advice. This advice was only one on one.

One of my persistent hopes was this site could be a venue where advice isn't just one on one but available to anyone who looked. Unfortunately there is a section of the posters that are experienced pilots but instead of passing on those hard earned nuggets of knowledge seem only interested in attacking and denigrating other thread contributors in between blowing their own horn about how great they are/were.

However that is the nature of the internet and so I don't let it bother me. If forum readers get some value from my posts then I am happy because in a small way I have paid forward all the help I have given.
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Re: Lets talk about SOP's

Post by Eric Janson »

I have worked at companies where there was an SOP that allowed some flexibility and at one company where there was a very rigid SOP.

In the latter case I was flying with 250hour Pilots and they were lost outside of the books - the only way to make this work was a rigid SOP.

I have written SOPs for 2 different Airlines - writing things down is the easy part. Layout/content/wording is the difficult part. I had written a nice non normal SOP for one Airline and they removed the entire section when it was published.

It is impossible to write an SOP for every situation - a better way to look at SOPs is to see them as a set of tools. You use the appropriate tools for the situation at hand. This is especially true of abnormal situations (these can be extremely complex) where good communication and effective teamwork can make the difference between an incident and an accident.

Some real world examples of SOPs in the real world.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swissair_Flight_111

This is an example of following SOP when the priority should have been to get the aircraft on the ground. This accident did result in a lot of changes to checklists and operating philosophy.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qantas_Flight_32

In this case the crew were facing 58 different ECAM messages some of them contradictory. There was no SOP for this situation but they managed to land the aircraft safely. They had 2 extra Captains on board which really helped.
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Re: Lets talk about SOP's

Post by justwork »

True North wrote:
Rockie wrote:The key is knowing when adherence to SOP's is required and when it is not. Lots of people fail at that in both directions. No one side is always right...or wrong.
Interesting. Give me an example of when adherence to SOP would not be required.
I believe Swissair in Halifax, or St. Margarets Bay to be more accurate, is a pretty solid example of following SOP's to the demise of everyone.

Edited... I see that Swissair has been brought up.

I have had on more than a few occasions been told to keep the speed up on approach, which brings me out of the profile in the SOP, but am stable by 1000' which is another part of the SOP. Don't go fast, get taken off the approach and moved to the back of the line, so now you're looking at how much fuel you have left instead of shutting down on the gate.

Another example is reduced take off performance. The SOP was that this should be done always as long as performance criteria was met. Then you're departing after a heavy on min seperation, why not go full jam and make sure you rotate before they did and will stay above their climb profile? Sure, you have the minimum required time seperation, but I'd rather be above their wake instead of chancing a bast through it.

How about wx radar usage. I had worked at a previous company where, if the weather radar was required for departure it was to be on the PF side and the PM had to have terrain up - always. Now I'm departing from an airport where there is no terrain, just the earth that is field elevation. There is significant weather during your departure and the FO is flying, are you going to put terrain up, which offers you zero useful information or do you think it would be wiser to put the radar on your side?

Taxi speed 10kts in a turn 25kts going straight and when wet 5kts in a turn and 15kts straight. You've got 6000' of runway to back track and the runway just meets wet criteria, and someone else is on the approach. For me, 15kts is a little slow.

You are on the ground up north, it's -30, you notice on your walk around that a couple of the rampies are in the cargo compartment keeping out of the wind waiting for the bags. You get to the cockpit and get a smoke warning. The guys are in the cargo bay, so they're either burning OR you know it's an ionization smoke detector and their breath has likely set off the cargo smoke warning. However the SOP calls for a memory item that's going to flood their little winter oasis with a gas that could kill them. Maybe ask the FO to peak out and see what's going on? Or mindlessly blow the bottle? I don't know.

I believe that SOP's are a great tool, but it isn't the only one! As a pilot, you still need to use that grey shit between your ears on occasion.
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Re: Lets talk about SOP's

Post by xsbank »

Follow the SOPs. Know your QRH cold. Know the Limitations too. You are not entitled to second-guess them, just do it. The example of a Navajo running at idle? Remember what happened to that King Air in Vancouver that killed that young father and his copilot? Do you understand the drag of a propeller at idle vs. feather?

I would have fired you for not following SOPs. You got home safe DESPITE your actions. Your airplane, go crazy. My airplane, my way. Rockie, you’re fired too.

Sorry, not permitted any more.
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Re: Lets talk about SOP's

Post by valleyboy »

So I'm reading here that there are a few out there that feel SOP's totally remove the requirement for people to think or use common sense because the SOP's are black and white and grey has no place in today's flight decks -- Damn -- that's wonderful. I have yet to see an SOP that deals with the dreaded multiple unrelated scenario. I'm not sure if it still goes on but there was a time when AC had that Cincinnati exercise in the sim just because it was meant to get people thinking. Maybe the in the NG iron there is no need to deviate from SOP but in the classics one had to always ready to adapt. I'm also thinking the the incident on the 380 had people thinking outside the box as well. SOP's are a requirement but as I have said before they are also not written in stone to a point where adhering to them ends up hurting people. The trick is to know when and how to adapt to the unexpected - that's why they pay you the big bucks! :mrgreen:
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Re: Lets talk about SOP's

Post by Meatservo »

I can’t think offhand of any time, in recent memory especially, I’ve found it necessary to deviate from SOP, and I worked for many years at an ad-hoc charter air service where you would think deviations would be common because of the incredibly varied situations and conditions we found ourselves in. But the fact is, a well-written set of procedures takes airmanship and judgement into account, and is vague where it needs to be vague, and specific where it needs to be specific. In this way you can give people the leeway to use their imaginations, I mean “judgement”, in situations where that behaviour is warranted.

I know most of you guys are looking at this from a big-plane, big airline point of view, but for an example, let’s think of an imaginary SOP a person might come up with for, say, flying a turbo-DC-3 on skis. Well, the SOP might make it mandatory that at least one low pass must be made over the intended landing area, even if you were there just yesterday. The SOP might make it mandatory that only the captain performs off-strip landings. It might even go so far as to dictate that all off-strip landings must be “wheel” landings rather than three-point. (I’m making this up; I’ve never flown a DC-3). Anyway, whatever it is, these are not rules that “take all the thinking out” of the situation. Just as the situation in question becomes a bit hard to dictate one hundred percent how it should be done, and jeez I would hope for that job you’ve hired guys that don’t need to be dictated to, the rules just serve to reduce the amount of arbitrary variability you might find between crews, that might catch a pair of members off-guard if they hadn’t flown together very much.

I guess what I’m trying to say is that a well-designed SOP doesn’t give you any reason to WANT to deviate from it. Most of them have some kind of footnote about not being possible to cover every scenario, and explicitly state that if there is a safer option in a specific circumstance, then you’re expected to discuss it, brief it, and then do it- and be expected to talk to the chief pilot about it after.

You don’t have to tell people the “pull back-to-go-up” stuff. You do need to make it so that people know what to expect from one another, and reduce the amount of “making stuff up” that inevitably happens with a lack of a code of behaviour.

I used to think CRM was some kind of recent invention, too. But then I realized that the “good” captains and copilots were already acting that way. It just needed to be spelled out for the rest of us.
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Re: Lets talk about SOP's

Post by xsbank »

The reason for SOPs is so that if confronted with “an event,” it doesn’t matter if you are 5 months into your recurrent, you fall back on procedures. You don’t have to reinvent the wheel, don’t have to remember what happened to Bob in 1972 when it happened to him and it shouldn’t matter if you’re not at your best today, you follow them. If they are NOT going to save your butt, you use you ingenuity. But all of the examples you lot have provided are not good enough. We know that the majority of accidents are not mechanical any more, they are human-caused, so use all the tools you’ve got. When something goes South, use what has been provided and use what you have memorized and go there first. If you are confronted with a death experience, deal with it. But that incident with the Navajo engine has me rolling my eyes; then again, I had a friend who nearly bought it in a Navajo when the mechanics had dicked with the wastegates and when he shut one down, he hadn’t enough power to maintain. That was his fault, partly, because he knew it was down on power. He should have refused the flight. There is always a bunch of issues in an accident.

“Land at the nearest suitable airport” is nebulous enough to drive a DC3 through, but think how silly you’d feel if you diverted to an airport and didn’t get to it for some reason and the only reason you chose it was because if you spent the night at the closest one, you’d be uncomfortable?

Reread Meat’s post.
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Re: Lets talk about SOP's

Post by Skyhunter »

xsbank wrote:

I would have fired you for not following SOPs. You got home safe DESPITE your actions. Your airplane, go crazy. My airplane, my way. Rockie, you’re fired too.

Sorry, not permitted any more.

xbank, I wouldn't work for you.

Fighter SOPs were what you did when you didn't have time to brief what you really wanted to do. SOP 4 plane take off used to be 3 in vic formation in the front, a single 30 seconds later. I could brief 2+2, 1+1+!+1, 2 +1+!. Allowed me flexibility to do what I wanted for the conditions, but if no time I could say SOP and everyone would know what is happening.

Airline SOPs do need to be more stringent cause we don't brief for an hour or more, but they are losing the flrxibility to make decisions for specific conditions of the day, that could improve the operations.

I follow them now, but I hate the loss of flexibility. The pendulum has swung to far, and the thinking is being removed. Ah well 14.5 years to retirement and then I won't care.

Sorry for any typo's and grammar, not wearing my glasses right now.
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Re: Lets talk about SOP's

Post by complexintentions »

It's interesting to view the different perspectives based on actual experience. I'm in full agreement with Rockie on this one - there are SOP's that simply don't match real-life operations, and then that becomes a problem. In one previous employer, a large fleet operator with about 3,400 pilots and several hundred widebody aircraft, there were SOP's taken from Airbus and grafted onto Boeing operations and vice versa, in the name of "standardization". Didn't always work so well. In my present company, smaller, about 1,200 pilots, the manuals and procedures are riddled with contradictions, ambiguities, and vaguely-written sections that leave themselves open to interpretation. Some of that is by design for legal reasons, no doubt. But the EFB manual sections contains:

- FOM
- MEL
- RAM
- QRH
- AFM
- Airport Page Manual
- Aviation Security Manual
- Dangerous Goods Manual
- EOM
- ETOPS Manual
- FAA Ops Spec
- National Ops Spec
- FCOM V1
- FCOM V2
- FCTM
- FPPM
- GOM
- RIM

These are just the operational manuals. I haven't even bothered to include administrative documents.

All of these are in constant revision. If one thinks there are no errors or contradictions inherent in this enormous amount of constantly changing data, they simply haven't flown at a major airline. Rockie has. He is absolutely correct about the difficulty in changing procedures, even changes that seem "obvious".

I'm a huge believer in SOP's. You can't run an airline without them, it's a non-starter. But the whole squabbling about whether SOP's can be written to properly cover every situation is a bit stupid when comparing a private company with a Navajo to airline ops.

One of the main goals of SOP's is to standardize and simplify. Somewhere along the way some people seem to have decided that means you are now permitted to abandon critical thought. As evidenced by a few incidents where a bit more suspicion of the situation would have perhaps been a Good Idea, that doesn't always end well.
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Re: Lets talk about SOP's

Post by goingnowherefast »

Well said complex.

Everybody needs to think critically about what the SOP is doing in a given situation. If the result isn't desired, then don't do it. Perhaps it's SOP to always build a deck with a hammer. Well what happens when they supplier drops off several boxes of screws?
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Re: Lets talk about SOP's

Post by xsbank »

You don’t have to worry about working for me, I am retired.

Peggy’s Cove was a bad one, but then how could you write an SOP to cover flames and melting plastic dripping on the pilots? I think there were lessons learned and SOPs were changed. That’s the whole point.

That argument about fighters is disingenuous, I worked for a guy who was cashiered for deadsticking a Harvard into a farmer’s field. He walked away, the plane was fixed. The sop was to bail out so he was fired. He didn’t follow SOPs.

At the risk of being rude, ex-fighter pilots were the most difficult to integrate into a multi-crew environment because they had been entirely used to flying alone.
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Re: Lets talk about SOP's

Post by True North »

What I'm seeing here is a bunch of people looking for excuses not to follow SOPs and I don't get it. I guess I was lucky. I never flew oversees or in a third world country, I only ever worked for Canadian or US operators and they all had good SOPs. I never once encountered a contradictory SOP in my entire career. I found some to be overly conservative and a couple that I thought were downright dumb but it never occurred to me that I had the option or authority to not follow them. The company that is paying my wages has every right to tell me how they want me to operate their airplane and if I don't like it I can always leave. On several occasions I approached my chief pilot and asked why a certain procedure was written the way it was and every single time I was given a reason. It was never arbitrary. Obviously there cannot be an SOP to cover every eventuality, like multiple unrelated failures, so sometime you might have to make it up as you go along but the chances of that happening are exceedingly rare. Very few pilots will encounter that in their career and best of luck to you if you do. I had a few emergencies in my career and the SOPs got me through each one just fine.

There is no excuse for not following SOPs unless there is a genuine safety concern. If your SOP says taxi at 15 knots on a wet surface that's what you do. If you don't like it talk to your chief pilot. To not comply is unprofessional and disrespectful, both to the person that wrote the SOP and more importantly to your partner. If you feel it is okay to ignore that SOP then what about the rest of them, where does it end? FOs should not have to keep a book on how each captain operates the aircraft, that is bush league.

To suggest that following SOPs means you don't have to think anymore is beyond ridiculous. They make the job easier and unquestionably make it safer.
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