Comments by "Keit Hammleter" (@keithammleter3824) on "Flying across Europe with a BROKEN engine! Smartwings 1125" video.

  1. The pilot in this case was clearly a ningnong that should not have been flying. Why was he flying? - that is the key question here, apparently not addressed by the incident investigation. In 60 years of working life, some of it in big companies, some in small, I have learn this: sometimes ningnongs somehow get employed or promoted beyond their competence, sometime well beyond. It happens. It happens because some favour got done, the guy provided a bulldust CV and they didn't check it, lots of reasons. It doesn't tell me the guy is or was mad - just incompetent, and got away with it until an incident requiring competence occurred. In whatever field we are in, we have all had incompetent teachers. If we are honest lots of us have experienced situations where we did not have the courage to report incompetence in more senior people - such reports usually aren't believed anyway, and they shoot the messenger. Having said all that, I am surprised at what the investigation report said and didn't say. I'm not a pilot, but my background is in another field (electric power generation) where mistakes can kill and/or cost a vast amount of money. I have participated in formal investigations and I have chaired formal investigations. The rule we follow is this: if an incident has occurred, the possible reasons include, and only include:- Deficiency in operating manual(s) Deficiency in training Deficiency in staff recruitment/selection Deficiency in performance monitoring Deficiency in machinery. Thus an investigation report should request the company (and manufacturer if applicable) to have corrective action along these four specific lines. It is no good just blaming the pilot and asking that he be psychiatrically checked, though that may be applicable. If just that is done, then the real problem, manuals, training, selection, monitoring, or machinery (presumably selection in this case) remains, and sooner or later another ningnong will cause another incident. I recall the accidents of the Comet 1, where at first they just blamed the pilots. Only in later investigations did it come to light that all the Comet 1 accidents were almost certainly due to faulty aircraft design and people died needlessly. This led to changes in how airliner accidents get investigated in Britain. somebody has done a wrong thing, or neglected to to do a required thing, the possible reasons include, and only include:- Deficiency in operating manual(s) I would be interested in comments from Mentour Pilot or anybody else from the airline industry on the relevance or otherwise of the above.
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