Comment by dghlsakjg
13 hours ago
I've never heard of anything even close to this.
Airlines in the US do not pressure pilots to avoid go arounds. Pilots in the US do not delegate life or death decisions to ops, especially since the FAA legally holds them accountable for that. All pilots are aware that they are responsible for the decision to go around or not.
Any airline found to be pressuring pilots to avoid go arounds would be in a world of pain with the FAA.
On cargo flights in particular timing and fuel usage are less critical than passenger flights, and a go around doesn't affect either much.
Pressure to avoid go arounds would also be incredibly counter productive since go arounds exist to preserve life and property. Pilots do go arounds to avoid costly incidents.
You are correct that the question is why they didn't do a go around, but I would bet a large sum of money that airline pressure to avoid go arounds was not a factor.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/miami-plane-crash-21-air-safety...
> The Amazon Prime Air Boeing 767 cargo plane that crashed off a Miami runway on Sunday, killing five people, was operated by a North Carolina company that has been accused by past employees of violating safety regulations, legal documents reveal.
There's a lot in the article, but this allegation is worth highlighting:
> Seuring's attorney, Michael Anello, told the judge that another 21 Air pilot, Johnny Salmonson, "was being pressured to fly in periods of time that were too short to comply with the proper amounts of rest, and that implicated safety. The layovers were too short."
Notably, none of those allegations from the fired former chief(!) pilot actively suing the company while appealing his rejected OSHA case touch on in-flight procedures.
If any of those are true, it will be very bad for the carrier, but they are not related to any of the failures being reported on.
> ...but they are not related to any of the failures being reported on.
If pilots weren't being given enough rest time, as alleged, you don't believe that might affect decision-making in the cockpit?
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Ahh, so the Amazon delivery contractor squeeze but the air cargo version, with the air cargo corporate entity shielding Amazon from liability.
We'll see if the NTSB mentions piss bottles in the cabin.
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Get-there-itis is absolutely a thing. No big airline would be dumb enough to say it that stuff explicitly but the pressures still exist.
There have been accidents around the world where pilots were trying to save fuel, get off work at a normal time instead of 2 hours extra holding, not wanting to divert and not be home, try to get on the ground so they don’t go over their max hours for the day, etc.
Yes it’s counterproductive. *It happens*. External or internal, it happens.
Get-there-itis is - quite famously - a pilot's internal desire (note: written before your ninja edit).
Sure there have been plenty of incidents. Can you point to one in the US, with pilots flying big planes, that hasn't led to regulatory change?
Its worth pointing out that pilots are almost always paid by flight hour. In other words, they get paid more to go around.
The worst aviation accident ever had this as a major contributing factor, the KLM plane at Tenerife was almost near their maximum crew time so if they didn't take off soon they'd have to stay overnight.
That one did lead to major regulatory changes. It wasn't in the US though but there was an American plane involved (which was not to blame)
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We are talking about the same company that forces its employees to piss in bottles while driving to save time.
I'm no Amazon fan, but that was routine in trucking before Bezos was even born.
Similar to farmers working in the fields - they didn't walk all the way back to the farmhouse if they had to pee.
There have already been crashes where one contributing factor was pressure to land and avoid any kind of delay - even if risky. Remember that pressure doesn’t need to be explicit. It can be the result of all kinds of factors - including physical. Maybe they were already late and pilots with fewer “on time” arrivals are lower in line for promotions. We already have stories from Amazon delivery drivers and it’s not insane to think some of that culture has leaked through to other aspects.
And high levels of stress can lead people to break rules. People lose the cognitive faculties needed for compliance. Even things that person personally believes and agrees with.
Is there any evidence of your theory?
Has timeliness based performance reviews ever been reported at any US carrier in the past half century?
Go arounds are not even very common (like 0.3% of landings).
Southwest airlines had a culture of turning around fast at the gate. So maybe no explicit policy but culture can drive unintended consequences and decisions.
Fast gate turnarounds have nothing to do with what happens in the cockpit. That affects the cleaning crews.
Take a look at Southwest's safety record. I believe they have 1 fatality due to an air incident in their history due to an uncontained engine failure that was not related to maintenance.
1 passenger fatality. They also have at least one ground fatality. (Still very impressive!)
Turnaround at a gate and a life-or-death go-around judgement are two entirely different operations governed by entirely different sections of the FAA.
Also this was Amazon, not Southwest.
Southwest's had a few dramatic overruns by pilots overeager to get on the ground, notably at Burbank (no fatalities) and Midway (one death).
I think the point being made is that time-pressure can come from a company's culture, not just its (unspoken) policies.
>Airlines in the US do not pressure pilots to avoid go arounds. Pilots in the US do not delegate life or death decisions to ops,
Construction companies in the US do not pressure employees to get shit done. Construction workers do not delegate the decisions to work in sketchy circumstances, especially since OSHA holds them accountable for all that.
See how silly that sounds?
They cook up the rules to be all compliant and whatnot and then everyone breaks them a little pretty often and in tasteful ways in order to actually get the job done. If you get caught or screw up, it's on you.
I assume this sort of pressure happens a lot less with pilots because of the cost of screw ups but there's still probably some implied pressure there.
The only thing silly is comparing the construction industry to the airline industry. Construction is pretty notorious for openly encouraging unsafe work environments, airlines are not.
Airlines are much more tightly bound by the FAA than any construction company is to any regulatory agency. Airlines have to get permission to let their pilots read documents off an iPad instead of paper, for example. It just isn't a good comparison to compare the most safety aware industry on earth to one famous for ignoring safety rules.
I've worked construction. I have a pilots license in multiple countries (including the US). They aren't the same.
Pilot gets more veto power than the crane guy who gets more veto power than the residential concrete crew but they all still get talked to if they can't get their jobs done.
I didn't say the same. I said the pressure was probably there too. But you can construe it as the former because that's a way easier thing to argue with.
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The same FAA that lets Boeing certify its own planes?