Cockpit distractions and lack of professionalism have become top aviation safety issues in the past year. Two Northwest Airlines pilots flew 150 miles past their destination in October because they were working on laptops. A crash on Feb. 12, 2009, near Buffalo, which killed 50 people, was triggered in part because pilots were chatting and not paying attention to flight conditions, the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) concluded.
"There is no room for distraction when your job is to get people safely to their destinations," Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood says in a statement to be issued today. "The traveling public expects professional pilots to focus on flying and on safety at all times."
http://www.usatoday.com/travel/fligh...5-pilots_N.htm
Since most Flyertalk activists are airline consumers, I'm interested to see where people come down on this. Is there any room for judgment by the flight crew? Yeh, I know that plane passed up its destination. Yeh, I know that conversation was
part of the reason for the Colgan crash.
But I'm still wondering how "sterile" a cockpit can really be. I work in a situation where our actions can sometimes be critical. But so far I've never seen any evidence that the mistakes we do make are caused by the conversation that goes on. In fact, I'd say failure to communicate in a clear and timely way is more often the real cause.
Professionalism is a good word for the defect that causes malperformance. That is, self-management to snap into the work role at any instant. What that means to me is that part of your brain is always situation-aware, and the professional can shove distractions aside at a split second. To me, this is nearly the opposite of sterile cockpit. People who must attempt to focus on the prime task incessantly are people I'd hesitate to entrust with something important. They have no inner control or flexible response. They aren't even equivalent to robots.
I do want professionalism. But I am not at all convinced that a sterile cockpit is going to patch over the severe deficiences involved in some of these incidents. The Colgan captain made a disastrously wrong response to a stall situation. Why the lack of cockpit sterility is blamed for that escapes my comprehension.