Originally Posted by
skybluesea
absolutely wrong, ICAO advocates for and has adopted the Reason Model (after James Reason, Professor at Manchester University) - many know this as the "Swiss Cheese" model that understands that failures are pretty much always a series of system failures.
http://www.safetyleaders.org/sup
When I earned my commercial-instrument rating nearly 4 decades ago, remember being taught exactly what you are saying...since then the industry has completely moved away from such narrow thinking to a Collaborative Decision Making Model, recognizing that a successful flights requires numerous moving parts to all be going in the same direction at the same time - and that can't happen if the entire airline team is not aligned.
Yes, PIC can make catastrophic error, but that error may have started in the hiring process, inadequate training, operational policies that create conflicts in the cockpit, scheduling that undermines alertness, etc, etc, etc... What Professor Reason has done for us all is to point out the fundamental error in thinking that failures can be individualized, and instead a new model has been adopted that is telling by the significant reduction in accidents in past 4o years.
AF is a remarkably safe airline given the scale of its operations far larger than AC - Mr. Smith is definitely a responsible safety manager, just like anyone who decides what resources are put in front of a customer.
Agree 100% here. If we look back at one of the most notorious AC mess ups, the so called "
Gimli Glider" event, the incident was caused by a serious of mistakes from maintenance pulling out the breaker in a fuel gauge, poor documentation on the 767 due to it being just launched, political: we just moved from imperial measure to metric and consequently poor training by ground crew and pilots on this change, resulting in the insufficient fuel being loaded. The only thing that saved that flight was the fact that the PIC was an experienced glider pilot and had knowledge of airfields in the area from his time serving in the military.
If we view AC management through this lens then we would have to give them a C at best. One could look at the runway incursions that happened twice at SFO in the span of a couple of weeks last year (
AC 781 and
AC 759). The San Jose Mercury has a
good write up on these mess ups. I won't even go into the times where I had to fight with AC to get something I'm entitled to per *A policy. IMHO AC is in a very complacent position, neither do they have the intense competition to force them to provide a better service nor are they lackadaisical enough to cause the travelling public (and most importantly FFs and VIPs) to scream blue murder!
Safe Travels,
James