The Airlines Versus The FAA On Air Safety
Several airlines have opted out of a safety program which, for years, has been regarded as a great success. But the airlines say they want changes so they can punish pilots for what they call willful and intentional safety violations. It escapes me how airline management thinks a professional pilot would willfully violate a safety regulation because there is no advantage for a pilot doing so.
But since there is an advantage to the corporation when management violates federal regulations without getting caught, perhaps management people think pilot, too, spend as much time as management types do at figuring ways around regulations.
The stucture of business is such that psychopaths can flourish in the corporate culture. That should be obvious in view of recent events on Wall Street. Management people are -- in far more cases that non-therapists realize -- psychopathos who abstain from doing damage to others ONLY because of fear of being caught, fired, or otherwise punished. Psychopaths do not understand at all there non-psychopaths operate on a different basis: empathy for others, or at least, identification with others. That does not compute in their brains. Thus it is natural for a psychpath to think the only reason a pilot would do the job right is fear of punishment. That belief -- plus the fact that psychpathos enjoy punishing others -- is the only way I can explain the logic behind airline management's decision to opt out of a program proven to enhance safety.
Even if they didn't care, pilots know about enforcement by gravity. Gravity can be counted on to "punish" a pilot who tries to break the law of gravity -- every time.
For example, one of the "Ten Commandments Of Aviation" is " Maintain thy airspeed when landing lest the earth rise up and smite thee!" When you have that to deal with, a form of enforcement which enforces EVERY time a pilot screws up that bad, it should be obvious even to a psychopath that the their punishment is not useful.
For an article on this, see this link.
Airlines Sue To Stop FAA Pilot Fatigue Protection
Pilot fatigue is one of the biggest, if not the biggest, threat to airline safety. Before deregulation, unions were fairly successful in negotiating agreements which protected pilots against extreme fatigue. But deregulation changed that. As new airlines sprang up with no unions, and no retirement to pay for, the legacy airlines were under pressure to compete. Pilot unions were forced to relinquish these protections.
Yet, at unionized airlines, pilots were able to deal with the problem by calling in sick when fatigue mounted. Airlines fought back by reducing the amount of sick leave available.
The warfare continues, now in court, as JetBlue, US Airways, Continental, American, and two cargo airlines, Evergreen and Atlas, have filed a lawsuit against the FAA to challenge the legality of new rules to provide better protection from fatigue on flights lasting sixteen hours or longer.
It is interesting to see JetBlue join this suit even though it has no flights of that length. JetBlue is the airline that got into trouble with the FAA when the decided to do fatigue "experiments" by having pilots fly from the East Coast to the West Coast and back to the East Coast in one day with passengers aboard the plane.
JetBlue's founder has been quoted as saying he doesn't think the FAA should impose any rules on the airlines unless an accident has proven the rule necessary. I guess JetBlue just wants to take a stand against any government efforts to impose safety.
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