Double Standards, who among us have not voiced these accusations against parents, spouses and or bosses. We all had damn good reasons, didn't we. I never gave it a second thought, until I started giving Quality Awareness courses and found out that we wallow in Double Standards.
How so, in Aviation just as in other critical industries; Quality, Safety and Security are not nice things to have, they are core values, they are culture and should be second nature. We should breathe, think and live these values. (This is the party line)
Back to reality, in Quality there is a need for continuous improvement and we have that nice Plan, Do, Check, ACT (PDCA for short) process. In our personal life PDCA is intuitive, we plan to go some place, we start the journey (do) we find a problem we change our route (act) and then check again to see if there is another problem until we reach our destination. And we do that for every thing we do.
The other intuitive aspect is Risk Assessment, in our personal lives (unless we are distracted or doped) we run a quick risk assessment and mitigate the risk for every thing we do, be it crossing the street, driving, playing or cooking you name it.
So why don't we use it in our professional life, the standard answer is we are too busy with work, duh. Really, too busy to improve or be safe. Why is it when it comes to our personal issues we perform certain things and when it comes to work we don't even think of these things; Simple DOUBLE STANDARDS.
So please before you start accusing people of double standards, have an inward look at yourself.
Interesting topic.
ReplyDeleteI instantly remember the AF447 ACARS MSG print that showed a cascade of electronic failures. http://www.airlinepilotforums.com/hangar-talk/41429-acars-msg-air-france-447-a.html
I also remember Swissair SR111 at Nova Scotia in 1996.
The double standard in this unfortunate accident is the use of Kapton (KTT) insulated wiring despite the high safety risk involved with Kapton insulation in aging or damaged wiring.
Surely I know that fleet-wide replacement of dangerous wiring is economically unviable, but it surely goes against the air an engineer breathes. The 'fix' of investigators to this inherent safety flaw is that the six worst air accidents in history are all unsolved. They remain officially investigated...
The notion held by many within the aviation industry that "wire is just wire" is irresponsible. Thats what I call a serious double standard.
It's not strange that Airbus finally decided to change from KTT wiring to TKT wiring from mid 2006 (as opposed to Boeing who changed general wiring as early as 1992 in their B737 product lines)
A little more background information in short:
http://www.iasa.com.au/folders/Safety_Issues/Aircraft_Wire/RAFKapton.html