What a horrible year....Lets all pull together in 2012

[Captain_Canuck]

Fellow pilots, flight ops personnel, engineers, management, rampies,

This year, 2011, has been a very tough year for aviation in Canada in general. Too many times this year, fathers, mothers, brothers, sisters, wives, mom's and dads have not come home from work and we each need to do our part to make sure that this does not happen.

If it means taking an extra 5 minutes to wait for the latest weather update to come, then wait.

Take that extra 3 minutes and to a more through walk around, check everything. Don't just kick the tires! If you gut tells you something isn't right, it probably isn't. Re-check everything to make sure the holes are not starting to line up.

If your tired, don't fly. Don't let your company back you in to a corner. I know this is tough and I for one have never had to face it but not flying while tired is FAR better than not coming home from work.


If we all put our collective heads together and make a concerted effort to improve safety and slow things down we can all do our own part to make sure that everyone gets home safely every night.

My heart is with all those great aviators in Canada that have taken that eternal flight west in to the sunset.

For the rest of you, fly safe.
CC

[howzat]

Pilot Error is alive and well.
Latest figures show 75% of general aviation and over 50% of airline accidents due to pilot error.
In the last 9 years 10 airliner crashes and over 900 people killed due to pilots losing control of airliners.

[Les Habitants]

Pilot Error is alive and well.
Latest figures show 75% of general aviation and over 50% of airline accidents due to pilot error.
In the last 9 years 10 airliner crashes and over 900 people killed due to pilots losing control of airliners.

Well with the number of idiots I've seen go flightline with just 250 hours, and the number of captains I've seen falling asleep in the cockpit...why am I not surprised?

[Doc]

Rocket science not required.
Pull your heads out of your asses.
Maintain a positive rate of climb after takeoff and on missed approaches. Pretty easy.
Don't .. run.
Learn to do a 180 degree turn. Right fucken NOW.
Don't "push" duty, weights, fatigue, weather.
Don't let anybody else "push" you either.
Stay within your aircraft's envelope.
Stay within your envelope.
Establish a descent angle before descending at night.
Put the bloody gear down for landing.
Take off into the wind.
Don't do intersection take offs at places like YPM.
C'mon Man.....THINK!

[Les Habitants]

Rocket science not required.
Pull your heads out of your asses.
Maintain a positive rate of climb after takeoff and on missed approaches. Pretty easy.
Don't .. run.
Learn to do a 180 degree turn. Right fucken NOW.
Don't "push" duty, weights, fatigue, weather.
Don't let anybody else "push" you either.
Stay within your aircraft's envelope.
Stay within your envelope.
Establish a descent angle before descending at night.
Put the bloody gear down for landing.
Take off into the wind.
Don't do intersection take offs at places like YPM.
C'mon Man.....THINK!

Great points doc. Especially on the missed approaches. Why people are even worried about passenger comfort at that point is beyond me. You're 300 freakin' feet about the ground. GET UP!

[TA/RA]

Great list! Thanks for that

[Panama Jack]

Good point, Les Habitants. The "passenger comfort" thing gets overplayed and hackneyed and a misguided excuse for other issues. These poor souls have been crammed into economy class seats and been malnourished for the last few hours. If they are still with us at this point I don't think they are quite that delicate!

[Prairie Chicken]

Excellent post Doc!

Nicely put Jack.

[High and Behind]

We're doing our yearly risk management review at our company. We go through almost every incident report back as far as 20 years over a 3 week period. Some of these reports are fictitious in that they extrapolate to the worst case scenario to exemplify the need for diligence on everyone's part to produce a culture with as few holes in the Swiss cheese as possible. By going back as far as we do we get a great picture of where we have come from and weather or not we are actually stemming the tide of Normalization of Defiance within our company culture.

It's quite amazing sometimes to see things repeat themselves, but as humans we are the weak link in the aviation chain and are prone to being the wild card in almost every example of breaches in our risk management systems. After all we did create it.

If you can I would encourage everyone to participate in there companies RM/SMS system as much as possible.

It is a valued education indeed.

[Les Habitants]

Good point, Les Habitants. The "passenger comfort" thing gets overplayed and hackneyed and a misguided excuse for other issues. These poor souls have been crammed into economy class seats and been malnourished for the last few hours. If they are still with us at this point I don't think they are quite that delicate!

Thanks Jack. I heard a story of an A330 pilot in Europe who was flying with a rather sick copilot, so he was doing most of the flying (This is the way I heard it, so I apologize for inaccuracies...the point will still remain at the end). The wx was crap, and they did the ILS and missed. So in the missed, the captain slowly leveled out (Descending almost 100 feet below minimums), slowly added power, and did a very nice very very nice smooth passenger comfort go-around. It turned out that it was such a slow manuevere, that he actually buzzed the hotel room a mile off the end of the runway by just 30 feet (seriously, you used THREE miles to go around?) and set off all the car alarms with his vortices. He was demoted, and ended up committing suicide a year later (not sure if it was related). Pretty sad story!

Seriously people. Don't worry if first class joe gets pushed into his seat or spills his pop on his gucci suit, if you're near the ground...you're gonna die! Get that plane up there, and make sure you count THREE positive rates of climb each time. It should be the priority.

[Pratt X 3]

I heard a story of an A330 pilot in Europe who was flying with a rather sick copilot, so he was doing most of the flying (This is the way I heard it, so I apologize for inaccuracies...the point will still remain at the end). The wx was crap, and they did the ILS and missed. So in the missed, the captain slowly leveled out (Descending almost 100 feet below minimums), slowly added power, and did a very nice very very nice smooth passenger comfort go-around. It turned out that it was such a slow manuevere, that he actually buzzed the hotel room a mile off the end of the runway by just 30 feet (seriously, you used THREE miles to go around?) and set off all the car alarms with his vortices. He was demoted, and ended up committing suicide a year later (not sure if it was related). Pretty sad story!

Close: B741, British Airways, London Heathrow UK, 1989

[winds_in_flight_wtf]

Rocket science not required.
Pull your heads out of your asses.
Maintain a positive rate of climb after takeoff and on missed approaches. Pretty easy.
Don't .. run.
Learn to do a 180 degree turn. Right fucken NOW.
Don't "push" duty, weights, fatigue, weather.
Don't let anybody else "push" you either.
Stay within your aircraft's envelope.
Stay within your envelope.
Establish a descent angle before descending at night.
Put the bloody gear down for landing.
Take off into the wind.
Don't do intersection take offs at places like YPM.
C'mon Man.....THINK!

One would think this is common sense no ?

[winds_in_flight_wtf]

We're doing our yearly risk management review at our company. We go through almost every incident report back as far as 20 years over a 3 week period. Some of these reports are fictitious in that they extrapolate to the worst case scenario to exemplify the need for diligence on everyone's part to produce a culture with as few holes in the Swiss cheese as possible. By going back as far as we do we get a great picture of where we have come from and weather or not we are actually stemming the tide of Normalization of Defiance within our company culture.

It's quite amazing sometimes to see things repeat themselves, but as humans we are the weak link in the aviation chain and are prone to being the wild card in almost every example of breaches in our risk management systems. After all we did create it.

If you can I would encourage everyone to participate in there companies RM/SMS system as much as possible.

It is a valued education indeed.

I actually find that pretty fascinating and productive. Any other companies do this?

[ivtec]

Edit

[Beefitarian]

.is it still ok for me to have ice on my wings at takeoff though? (i vaguely recall the CARs saying something about that stuff blowing off by itself on the takeoff roll). Thoughts?

You are responsible to ensure it will blowoff and is not attached to the wing before the aircraft runs off the runway or worse.