Hmm - lets see the report in full first before we decide to re write the rule book or training manual I say.
In my experience, some people meet and deal with certain challenges or difficulties that most people will never ever come across. It is important that we learn from past events in a positive manner, but it must be measured in a rational way.

David

Umm, I was also unclear about where it was heading as well. Human factors has always played a major part in aviation and ST's are a hugely valuable tool for crews and they have been around since the beginning of aviation in some shape or form. Of course one of their greatest assets is that they CAN be reset and the crews CAN learn and try again. The training may have been 'inappropriate' but I find it difficult to believe that he was suggesting the training should have been 'live' rather than 'simulated'! Getting it wrong in the sim seems infinitely better than the alternative! Better to fix the fault of course. PPRuNe might be more appropriate.

With 25 years spanner experience on aircraft (be it predominantly military) I agree with P48, there is some cross over’s to health and safety. Human factors (as already discussed), working at height (ground maintenance not flying at 40K feet), deep vein thrombosis, re-cycled breathing air, cosmic radiation……they are all hot topics which have direct or indirect links to health and safety. There are too many to list, but this post is leaning more to a flight safety issue.

Flight safety rules are very strict and basically have a slightly different ethos and culture. You can for example argue that in theory, there is no place in flight safety for the “so far as is reasonably practicable” approach. When flying as a passenger (self loading freight), it makes me laugh when people moan because we are delayed at the airport for “technical reasons.” To me that’s good news; the crew have done their pre-flights and found a problem which will be fixed now, not later.

The post needs to be taken away from flight safety and made health and safety relevant or the mods have the right to lock it.

Betta, thanks for the clarification. While you were fixing them, I was, amongst other things, supplying the juice to keep them moving :-)
So I too have an understanding of the ethos and environment. Only ever co-piloted one on a simulator and almost managed to junk that within the first five minutes.

I don't, however, agree with you about the relevance. A discussion about how a simulator helps to train pilots is no different than a discussion about how advanced driving and the use of simulators helps drivers to gain without pain is it?
I do agree that the aviation technical detail etc is probably beyond the remit but the use of simulators / simulated exercises is important in many situations.
They are not just used to test or train users but also to test the equipment, machine etc. Their use is essential wherever the consequence of failure is serious of course but also where the human intervention level does not occur until a potentially critical situation develops. It can never guarantee an error free workplace but it is proven to substantially reduce the risk of critical error. Thus it is a fundamental part of training for all such situations.
It is also a constant learning exercise, both technically and for human factors. Each incident brings it's own learning and it is important that those lessons are heard. As a passenger I know that if those lessons are put into place the risk to me decreases, it certainly doesn't increase. If gaining that info from a simulator is possible then better that than an real air accident.
If the official report does make recommendations about simulator training I am confident that they will or have been put into place.

Then I must finish with a little flight story. Sitting on a 747-delay due to tech problems, cargo door will not close properly. 3 hours later, OK folks the engineer has taped it up and put sealant around the seal so we will be able to get you to JoBurg after all. I wonder whether the simulator training included that sort of information to passengers :-)


p48

Pete. I agree what you are saying but the thread (including your post, which I totally agree with fully), is leaning more towards flight safety and not health and safety.

Ron,
As it seem a third interim report, the director polarised the attention of pilots errors which I disagreed totally. I missed completely in the title the interoggation mark after Human failures. Sorry. They(pilots) got a few minutes to analyse what was going wrong under stress conditions knowing that they have no right to fail and I just again watched on tv that there was a great panic in the cockpit as they could not rely on data that for me a trained pilots will never faced this level of stress / panic in a flight simulator knowing they can reset.

Experts need to think outside the box on the way to design or review certain aspect for a suitable training for pilots. May be this exists already but not being an expert in this domaine, last night I was thinking of what can be done such as how to assess the human behaviour in stress or panic situation. Psychologists or aviation companies need to do something to avoid recurrence thus drawing lessons from this accident and others. By the way another airplane had an accident in Ghana yesterday and god blesses no victim.