Page 16 - Volume 17 Number 5

Ipassed my Private Pilot check ride a couple of weeks after myth17 birthday, my Commerciala couple of weeks after my 19th birthday, and started my first flying job a couple of weeks after my 20th birthday. That was the early ’70s. Now I’m old, and I’ve been flying professionally for 41 years.For the first dozen years of my career, I flew single-pilot in piston twins, most of it freight work, a lot of it at night and in all kinds of weather, which allowed me to develop and ingrain a number of bad habits and bad attitudes. I was in my twenties, and because I had successfully dealt with a good many issues, had amassed about 10,000 hours, and had not killed myself. I was feeling like I was pretty good at this airplane stuff. It was in the days before high altitude endorsements,By Russell Smithhigh performance endorsements, and biennial flight reviews, and long before the concepts of Cockpit (or Crew) Resource Management were being advocated.The Crew EnvironmentIn my early thirties, with a “slightly” inflated view of my ability, I accepted a job at a small regional airline. For the first time, I would be flying in a crew environment. Of course, the seniority system was in place and I started life at my new job as a first officer. I discovered my captains were pretty quick to let lowly first officers know they wanted things done differently than how they were being done. It took about two months to learn to become a good first officer. There were no written Standard Operation Procedures (SOP) at this company at the time, but, nonetheless, there were industry standard practices in place. Nine months later, my seniority number came up and I was upgraded to captain, so now it was my airplane and I could fly as I wanted to. Or, at least, so I thought. In the early 1980s, it turned that out first officers were not as quickto point out flaws to captains. As a result, it took me a long time to learn to become an acceptable captain in a crew environment.Some of those lessons were a little painful, but I like to think I have learned them well and have become a real advocate of CRM and a mentor to the next generation of aviators. Let me take a short moment to say thanks to those first officers who did say something; without them, my education would have taken much longer.Rank RespectAfter World War II, there were a large number of ex-military pilots who then entered the civilian pilot population. These were good men and experienced pilots, but they brought with them a military command structure where the captain was the final authority (a.k.a. God). I’m certain that was mandatory with bombs in the back, but perhaps not so much with paying passengers riding along. There were a number of crew error accidents, when at least one member of the crew knew there was a problem, that were later discovered thanks to the advent of cockpit voice recorders. These accidents lead to the advent of CRM. Now, 30 years later, it is my opinion that the industry has embraced the concept and most pilots in multi-person crews work14 • TWIN & TURBINEMAY 2013DevelopingResource