Boeing Pilot Warned of ‘Egregious’ Issue with 737 Max in 2016
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
> “I basically lied to the regulators (unknowingly),” Mr. Forkner says in the messages.
No one wants to hear their surgeon on the record saying "I'm just an OK surgeon"
In all, that's a lot of training, and pilots pay about as much as a doctor to get that training. Since attaining a Private Pilot's license myself (which I found challenging and which ATPs consider kindergarten) I've realized that actual airline pilots are in general remarkably good pilots. Even if you, sitting in the back cabin, think the landing is rough, it's probably a really good firm precision landing considering the conditions.
Not true at all, most of the ATPLs in my class were foreign and as such would be well beyond the reach of such rules.
It's only the statement about DUIs preventing flying for life I was objecting to, if someone really wants to become a pilot a DUI isn't going to stop them.
I am not sure there is any non-trivial skill[1] you can truly master without humbly "understanding" the vast amount of knowledge you do not hold.
[1] Swimming in the deep end of the Dunning-Krueger pool is not counted as a skill here.
The key trait I'm thinking of here here is owning up to your mistakes and not trying to cover anything up. Making an honest mistake is almost never punished, to encourage people to come forward. The thinking is that known mistakes can be fixed, but unknown mistakes may put someone else in danger. If someone is worried about being punished then they might be less likely to come forward, and that can put lives in danger in the future. This is intended for things like over-G'ing a jet. If you pull too many G's then maintenance has to inspect everything, which makes them angry and takes the jet off the flying schedule. But it's better to do the inspection than to have the wings fall off when another pilot is flying the next day.
The end result of this culture is that military pilots (who then filter into the airlines) don't get punished for some things that you might think they would (such as being a little too forward). It would be better if he said something non-PC (like "I suck at flying") if the alternative is him being afraid to speak up.
When a pilot exhibits seemingly contradictory behavior, it can usually be traced back to a tradition or training. They are often very raunchy in private, but extremely professional over the radio. There are some rules that they break every day, but there are other rules that they won't break even if it means losing their job. Nobody wants to hear a pilot downplay their abilities, but I'd prefer an honest pilot to one who falsely believes they are superman. The fact is that roughly half of airline pilots are below average (of all airline pilots), and they usually get to where they are going safely.
But this guy was/is a chief technical pilot at Boeing, and probably knows this plane better than 99% of all airline pilots, so he was probably just trying not to sound like an overconfident jerk.
It's worse if other people believe the pilot is a superman, because then the pilot feels intense pressure to be superman, and so will go to great lengths to defend his actions as being perfect.
I would find such a statement reassuring, assuming that their colleagues rate them higher.
In my experience over the years working with various professionals, the ones who speak highly of their own abilities tend not to be exceptional. The exceptional ones tend to be skeptical of their own abilities.
"What do you call the guy who graduated at the bottom of his medical school class?
Answer: You call him "doctor""
The point being, no matter how difficult or important the job, performance across the range of people doing that job will be more or less normally distributed. 50% of surgeons will be in either the second or third quartile, eg they will be closer to "average" than brilliant. A quarter will be in the first quartile, ie mediocre.
Obviously this is just a feature of how statistics (and human performance) works. It is not necessarily anything to be worried about, and in fact unless those in the first quartile are "incompetent" (which I am using as an absolute and not a relative term meaning "incapable of doing the job") there's nothing that can or should be done about it. If you immediately fired those in the first quartile, all you would be doing is a) firing people capable of doing their jobs, and b) establishing a new first quartile with different people in it.
It was horrifying at first, but now I think about it all the time in all my interactions. The person making my burger might be the Minimally Qualified Cook. What's the absolute minimum that I would want them to know for me to feel comfortable eating it?
Lawyers often profit from the misery of others (I know many lawyers that do great things and are proud of their work, but almost nobody gets into law because they "want to make the world a better place"), but sometimes that misery can prevent other's misery in the future.
Sadly the profits aren't in putting anyone in jail, but in civil suits. I would love to be wrong, but nobody is going to jail over this because nobody will profit from it.
It's very possible this is being completely blown out of proportion.
Ironically, after leaving Boeing, this same pilot is currently a first officer (co-pilot) at Southwest Airlines, which exclusively flies Boeing 737s.
> "I suck at flying"
a) How many warnings were not ignored by this pilot or others.
b) Whether this particular pilot was prone to being the 'pilot who called wolf'.
EDIT: Wait, there was no retraction. It's hard to tell from the NYT reporting, but the "lie" statement seems to be in reference to his sign-off on the removal of MCAS from pilot's manuals.