Where Birds Don't Fly

Training is a big chunk of aviation safety and a tool to ensure personnel are qualified to perform their duties. With ongoing training it could look like nobody is never fully trained. If someone is fully qualified and trained, then more training shouldn't be required. Training is therefore often looked at as being required for someone with lack of knowledge, qualifications and failure to perform. It couldn't be farther from the truth than that. It's a misconception that training only has one function of learning, and that this function is to become qualified. Human culture associates training with learning, where learning begins in preschool, graduates to kindergarten, then elementary, and finally to high school. Each step is required as a level of learning to qualify for the next level. These are building blocks of learning moving from unknown to known. It's to instil knowledge in someone who didn't have that knowledge. A training environment is the fruit of acqui...

It's neither true that when holes in the cheese lines up accidents happens, nor is it true that bad apples cause accidents. And if the facts were that every major accident is proceed by a few minor accidents and several incidents, there would be no management of safety. Safety would then be managed like a bag of marbles being dropped to spread in random patterns.  A ridged process runs over variables instead of managing. The holes in the cheese lines up because of a decision to slice the cheese in a certain way. If the objective was to slice the cheese in a way that the holes would not line up, a thorough analysis and risk assessment prior to slicing would be required. Holes lined   up in the cheese don't cause accidents. It is the outcome of how things are done during day to day of normal operations that are causing these events. When managing safety, daily routines and practices must be analyzed and then proceed to slice the task to manage the holes in the processes. Bad app...

On a clear blue sky day one airplane left on a westbound trip, while another departed   on a southbound adventure, both bound to be on time for an unknown converging mid-air path. If the data of these two flights had been communicated, applied corrective actions would have separated their paths. Mathematical equitation are applied every day to avoid conflicts when air traffic controllers (ATC) requests pilots to change speed or heading. These changes were not planned, but due to one or more variations new calculations predicted current paths to be converging in time. A once perfect project may over time reveal its flaws.  Unexpected variations, or special variations,   are hidden flaws hidden in layers of safety guards. Accidents happens when flaws are revealed in an unpredictable sequence and causing time crossing paths. People are the strength of all safety processes with a unique ability above and beyond any automation in resilience, and the understanding of communicat...