“He that will not sail till all dangers are over must never put to sea.” ~ Thomas Fuller. He wrote this towards the end of the 1600’s. So we’ve known for a long time that ‘perfect safety’ or zero-accidents is kinda silly. There are always dangers in the deep and in the air.
“There is still a lot of confusion over what seems to be basic things. We haven’t done a very good job of training folks.” ~ Aerobatic instructor Bruce Williams, expressing what many experienced pilots secretly know. Interview in the June AOPA Pilot magazine. Bruce is online at www.BruceAir.com.
“We are responsible for the incident and its consequences.” ~ Amtrak CEO Joseph Boardman on the fatal Philadelphia derailment. Whatever the engineer’s actions in speeding into the curve, it’s refreshingto see a CEO actually take responsibility for a crash. System Safety and Just Culture moving beyond the safety dept? (Guardian newspaper story 2 June 2015.)
That’s how you fly a glider, a C172, or in his case, an A380. One with the wing.
Richard Champion de Crespigny was the Captain of Qantas Flight 32, an A380 that suffered massive systems damage when number two engine exploded and severed many connections. It is the kind of crazy emergency that we don’t train for. It’s the type of crazy emergency that shows airmanship isn’t all loops and rolls. It’s deep systems knowledge. (Quote from an ‘Airways’ magazine interview, May 2015.)
