Jump Seating United Pilot Causes Drama at Southwest

> At the same time, she clearly didn’t exercise good discretion with who she shared this story with.

This is a bizarre conclusion, because it's not like she shared some confidential or sensitive information. It's just a story about a minor error.

I have no idea if this is an incident that should have been reported. If so, that's a compounding error. If not, who cares? Good safety culture welcomes scrutiny, surely.

Digression:

Incidents like this are why I know aliens aren't in Area 51, and generally believe that the government isn't withholding some huge bombshell secrets from us. Not because they don't want to, but because they can't.

In the event of any kind of info leak, discretion is thrown to the wind and FOMO sets in. The urge to "correct the record" becomes overwhelming. Information becomes a currency to spend. Only the best 3 letter agencies in the world can resist, and even they are only as strong as the weakest-willed.

Time + workforce churn = inevitable leaks for just about everything. You might be able to buy yourself a year or two with loyal employees and strict secrecy policies. But retaining a HUGE secret for 10+ years? Not compatible with society imo.

I work for an FDA regulated company and I presume the handling of complaints is handled similarly. Cases like this fall into a weird regulatory case. If a problem is identified by someone internal before it rises to a certain level of risk, it's treated as "no harm no foul". But if the same thing is reported from someone external, it triggers a mandatory investigation, audit, and possibly recall.

I think the idea is that if it's not a significant enough risky event, and the only person to ever even identify it as a risk has detailed internal knowledge, it's not as big a potential hazard and possibly much worse potential consequences were addressed before they became a problem. But if someone not privy to the same level of internal knowledge notices it, it's maybe not still so insignificant that it was headed off without serious consequence.

It would make sense in this case that the jump seat pilot mentioned it, and it was corrected early. Possibly if it hadn't been corrected that early, it could have still been caught and corrected differently. But instead, the FAA got a report from a third party, which normally suggests it was significant enough that an unrelated layman could notice and probably wasn't so insignificant.

The "trusted friend" is certainly not to be trusted. At a minimum that person was not in a position to report anything to the FAA because any information would have been hear-say. The FAA should have declined the information as being from a third party who wasn't directly involved and thus isn't in the position to report comprehensively.

Is this something that should be reported to the FAA? Yes or no?

What do unions have to do with this?

If it wasn't a safety issue that needed correcting why does it matter that it was or who reported it to the FAA?

So, was it a Boeing?

In this scenario the “trusted friend” is the hero of the story as he is the one who initiated a course of action that may have prevented a much more dire outcome in the future by insuring that the pilot in command will receive remedial training on proper cockpit management and the junior pilot will benefit by remedial training. Pilot error is a non starter and in many cases the ultimate game ender.