Reckless American 777 Pilots Refuse NTSB Interviews
onemileatatime.com
onemileatatime.com
In other words, the union seems to be looking out for its members at the expense of everyone's safety.
This is also part of a decade-spanning issue re audio recordings. Pilots have long fought to keep recorders out of cockpits. This is an extension of that fight. (Black boxes are different. They are only used in event of a crash and are generally not released publicly unless people are dead.)
It’s important that everyone have representation to advocate on their behalf, even in non-judicial settings. Let the union do their job, let the NTSB do theirs, and I hope the pilots are compelled to testify.
The court has rules. Each attorney's first duty is to uphold those rules, and the second duty is to argue for the client to the extent and in the manner those rules allow.
This seems quite similar to the process and rules that govern air traffic safety and its incremental improvement over the decades.
Me. I had many jobs where joining the union was "manditory". Whether it was the union at the universities where i studied or taught, or the union that runs the film industry in which i worked as a kid, there was no practical alternative. None of the unions of which I was forced to be a member ever represented my best interests.
Interesting to see how the escalation works in someones thought process, but these are not valid arguements.
"If you have nothing to hide, you dont need privacy"
Perhaps there are antiquated rules and possibly dangerous flight systems approved by the FAA. Maybe these pilots need to be protected from being publicly persecuted in the interest of corporate profit and confidence in the government.
They don't. You sometimes have to read more than just the HN headline to understand what the issues are.
On HN of all places we should realize complicated technical systems result in complicated technical problems and the easiest, lowest status, people to blame are usually not the cause of all problems in a system.
It seems highly likely there could be a problem with ATC giving a misleading or inconsistent clearance, or radio coverage being faulty or inadequate (I said "stop and hold at ground point One Alpha, not stop and hold at ground point One shhhhh"), or signage being inadequate, or the architecture of the airport being inherently faulty by design. No amount of knee jerk punishing the pilots automatically without impartial investigation will fix any of those safety concerns and as such that does not increase the safety of flight. Seems rather odd the NTSB is strongly opposed to a detailed impartial judicial review of their process?
If I had nothing to cover up, and someone asked for a different recording service to be used "no skin off my back" because I have nothing to cover up. Seems like the NTSB is trying to cover something up. I wonder why they would use a non-technical travel blogger to release their side of the story instead of numerous ATC organizations and unions or pilots orgs etc. What a fascinating source for the story?
And, while a complicated technical problem is likely to not be the pilot's fault, after a certain degree of refusing to cooperate with the investigation, it becomes their fault.
Also, onemileatatime is a long-standing news website that reports on the aviation industry; the NTSB "released their side of the story" in press releases.
Also we have no idea from the article if they crossed said lane by being around the safety margins usually set or if it was a close call. I guess there is a lot of safety margin taken in aero between saying "sure you can cross that lane nobody is about to take off" and "a jet is already bombing at full speed on that lane, don't cross!!"
The point of an investigation is to investigate. Not punish someone you are already sure it is the culprit.
Airlines in particular have a long and pervasive history of blaming "pilot error" for any and all safety issues. Until and unless it is conclusively proven that some maintenance, instructions, or mechanical system was faulty, pilots are in the cross-hairs. Remember the first 737MAX crash?
It is only natural for pilots to be concerned about being scapegoats, or that their on-the-record remarks implicating their airline could end their careers.
Unions are there to protect their members. End of story.
If there is no rule mandating it, I don't get why people are upset at the pilots for not cooperating with an investigation that could be career ending.
This article focuses on the pilots, but the outrage should be focused at the people who made the rules the pilots follow.
just also note that unions across the board from electricians and plumbers to healthcare workers frequently make the PR claim that their members are higher quality professionals than lower payscale non-union workers, and that they provide higher quality work which is safer for the public.
in this case they are directly subverting the safety standards of their industry in favor of narrow personal interest.
so yes, you're right, it's a choice, it can be done this way, but I'm right to draw conclusions from that as to what role unions play in their struggle vs the public interest.
Individual people can also form unions.
This should be a licensing requirement. Lie or withholding evidence to a safety regulatory board should lose you your license there and then.
Seems most people lose their minds when corporations only consider the wealth maximization of their shareholders. So what’s the difference here?
No rational actor would agree to a recorded interview with Federal officials in an investigative capacity without immunity.
The pilot will be subconsciously changing their own memories slightly to fit a better narrative. This is just what human memory does and you can't turn it off. These changes aren't particularly egregious unless you are consciously lying, but the legal definition of perjury does not care.
With written notes, those are going to be summarized in a way that adds doubt to any small discrepancies that might result from a pilot misremembering things. An exact recording makes it 100% clear that the pilot is doing that, which could be turned into a legal argument against them.
If the pilots won’t talk, they may be subpoenaed. Not sure if that means the 5th Amendment would apply.
Hoping a note taker misses some salient detail in your favor is just trying to game the situation when you probably feel you're at fault. This isn't someone that committed a crime and is facing a judge/jury with possibility of going to jail. This is a licensed employee responsible for the safety of a not small number of other human beings. Some things stand to higher accountability
nor shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself
Generally, it’s held that you cannot be compelled to testify if there’s a reasonable likelihood that the response may tend to implicate someone. So you often can invoke 5A in civil contexts (which is why you’ll see people invoke it before Congress, or in civil trials).
One main difference is that in a criminal context we typically can’t draw an adverse inference against someone for invoking their fifth amendment rights. Whereas in a civil context we can. That doesn’t help us here much, though, because to my knowledge the NTSB is mostly interested in getting to the truth of the matter and not assigning liability or penalties.
One option to pierce 5A is to grant immunity for all testimony covered. So if the NTSB was pretty sure that the pilots aren’t going to be criminally charged for the incident (which they likely wouldn’t be), they could work with the DOJ to immunize the pilots for their testimony. That eliminates the risk of criminal prosecution for their responses, and nullifies the fifth amendment.
But I don't see the big deal here. This appears to be a situation where we have a clearly at fault party, the NTSB isn't going to provide any big insight.
The pilots are trying to avoid civil liability (and maybe criminal, and maybe keep their jobs, though it seems very likely they'll be fired), for some clear reasons. They aren't keeping secrets, they're just trying to avoid giving written testimony on something they'd want to take the fifth on later.
To wit: this is just "don't talk to the cops". Your insurance company will give you the same advice. No, it's not the best way to help an accident investigator, but it might save you some money.
I think this is a more nuanced position than most of the comments led me to believe. The pilot's association believes that "recording of interviews lead to less candid responses from those witnesses," which I think is a legitimate concern.
If the goal is safety, then the pilots need to feel comfortable being candid. If they feel that any wrong phrasing/word could be a legal liability they will behave accordingly.
Do we? The discussion has VERY carefully avoided any discussion of what happened. Pinning the blame entirely on the pilots is what I'd do if I wanted to avoid pinning the blame on the controllers, or just wanted to write an anti-union screed.
I clicked on "about" and the author has absolutely no professional skills or qualifications related to the airline industry in any form at all, but his mind is certainly made up already about a "deep in the weeds" technical issue. I would rather hear the authors strongly held beliefs about K8S cluster design or ELK stack dashboards; its not like he's any less trained or qualified to hold those opinions.
I don't know whether audio recording is appropriate, but this article and some of the Internet pitchforks it's already prompting have shifted my initial kneejerk reaction to the headline... reminding me not to prejudge, nor to be so susceptible to Internet manipulation.
FWIW, aviation safety is party built upon encouraging a culture of professionalism, and sometimes involves confidentiality and protecting people who speak up about problems. For example, FAA/NASA ASRS: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aviation_Safety_Reporting_Syst...
(Disclosure: I've done software work for aviation safety programs.)
We have 19-hour flights now. Voice recorders should last 24 hours at least.
NTSB investigative materials are not ‘privileged’ in the same way accident investigations in the US DOD are (https://medium.com/code-for-america/john-allspaw-getting-the...) but perhaps they ought to be.
A core concept of safety is arriving at a root cause in an effort to continuously improve. This won't happen in an adversarial fact finding as the interests of the participants diverge instead of converge. Two key concepts here are Psychological Safety and Just Culture.
What could be adversarial about just recording the interview? While NTSB's argument for recording interviews is facially sound, it represents a change from previous practice. Further, it represents opening a collaborative and open fact-finding conversation to third parties who have adversarial interests. Key concepts here are "Don't talk to cops" [2] and Nothing to Hide [3]
It is ironic that the NTSB's interest in recording is in part driven by a lack of data caused by no-one at the airport pulling the Andon cord [4] at the time of the near miss. The cockpit voice recorders only record two hours. Since the flight continued to take off and flew for more than 2 hours, the voice data was lost. The NTSB seeks to record for "highest degree of accuracy, completeness, and efficiency" the pilots many days after the event based on their memory as a witness of themselves [4].
0. https://www.ccl.org/articles/leading-effectively-articles/wh...
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just_culture
2. https://www.learnliberty.org/blog/advice-from-cops-dont-talk...
> Is their refusal to be interviewed illegal? No, not as of now. Is it unethical? Absolutely, in my opinion.
Except nobody who means anything in this case cares about your opinion. Neither the pilots nor the judge who will take the case. Ethical or unethical in your opinion, any person in so much trouble has right to make decisions to defend themselves. If you believe in Constitution you have to believe in peoples' right to not incriminate themselves and you have to believe it is not unethical to use what Constitution affords to everybody.
They’ll get their interviews.
We already know from the ATC recordings who’s likely to be at fault. They haven’t much to gain by participating voluntarily.
The outcome of this legal wrangling will be an impartial judicial system recording will be made instead of the pilots being recorded by a hostile party. I'm really not seeing a problem with dispensing justice based on impartiality, or with justice being "blind".
Their job has collectively saved a huge number of lives. Flying is measurably safer because of them, not just in the US but world-wide. We know so much more about flight and flight safety because of it.
Refusing to be interviewed with them, and their union interfering feels very slimy. Pilots are responsible for all the lives on board, and they need to be held accountable when they make a mistake - even if it doesn't end in a loss of life.
Having long recordings is most important in cases where the plane doesn’t crash - if it crashes, the CVR will stop recording anyway.
So perhaps airlines should introduce a secondary CVR, that records for much longer, but isn’t as resilient? There’s plenty of cheap, consumer-grade equipment that would do the job fine.
I find myself agreeing with the union’s reasoning. There’s no justification for recorded audio. Stenographers are fine for all legal applications of authoritative transcripts.
If the air traffic controllers still had a real union they’d be doing the same thing.
I don't know how pilot investigations are conducted, but in less critical fields a simple investigation with a bias against particular parties can quickly turn into "here is some recorded evidence that.. " then the court can charge someone which tends to appease the desire to dig further. Not saying that's what is going on i have no clue, but let's consider those pilots are doing something perfectly legal and the fact it is legal is a stronger judgment basis than some article making it sound like public safety is being neglected by rogue pilots.
The past success in improving air transport is based on proceedings where getting to the truth of the matter is the highest value.
In a very narrow sense, it is good strategy to object to anything that isn't included in the current negotiated contract, and to demand "concessions" for adding things.
But when that stretches to "airplane pilots union actively hinders investigation into near-crash", the public shouldn't support the union.
This is not an opinion on the merits of what the pilots did or did not do, that will ultimately be determined by the investigation.
[1]: If the public's interests are not vigorously, well represented by the NTSB that is either an agency rule making issue or a legislative one, however in this case the NTSB has subpoena power so they have the tools they need to move this along as they should.
This article does reprint it. You might want to skim to that statement to both hear the other side and also to answer your question.
https://liveandletsfly.com/american-airlines-pilots-recorded...
But bottom line, the pilots are holding all the cards because there is no legal basis to require a recording. If the NTSB wants an interview, their only choice is to ditch the recordings. One can draw their own conclusions about why the NTSB is choosing not to interview instead.
JFC. How are they allowed to have such useless technology for something so important?