Peter wrote:
how many here would fly (light GA) with a total stranger i.e. a blind date?
I’ve done a lot of that in the US. Just hang out at the airfield, walk up to Joe and flatter him and a few minutes later he asks “want to go for a short flight with me?”. I do the same after a cursory look at the guy. If you eliminate all risk in your life then you are guaranteed to have the most boring life possible 
Peter wrote:
t puts a damper on the many seat sharing websites that are popping up everywhere, now that the cost sharing rules have been relaxed.
This feels like a déjà-vu. I believe we had an exchange about how those share economy sites that all have the same problem (Uber, AirBnB etc.) establish trust — a transparent rating system. You don’t pre-pay an eBay seller that has 10 ratings with 40% positive…
Coming back to this old thread (because the title is just right) how many here would fly (light GA) with a total stranger i.e. a “blind date”?
I was talking to someone about this today and IMHO very few would actually do exactly that.
It puts a damper on the many seat sharing websites that are popping up everywhere, now that the cost sharing rules have been relaxed.
Just to put a few things to bed about the latest changes in the airline SOP ‘s and policy’s.
Mentioned above has been the Helios accident, in this case the the cabin crew had been very slow to enter the cockpit, the reason for this is most likely to be the Authority gradient between the flight crew and cabin crew, the further south you go the greater this gradient gets and the more the cabin crew are prevented from questioning the flight crew because of social conditioning, this is why the cabin crew did not enter the flight deck until no contact had been made for a long time and all the passengers had been unconcious for a long time ( the cabin crew would have been on the O2 walk around bottle). By this time the cabin crew realisation that something was so wrong that it overcame their reluctance to question the flight crew. I doubt that such an accident would happen in Northern European or Scandinavian airline because of the much flatter authority gradient.
It seems to be that the “two crew in the cockpit rule” has been misinterpreted in some places with people thinking that the cabin crew member sits in one of the pilot seats, this is NOT the case, the cabin crew member sits in a seat within easy reach of the cockpit door so that if required the door can be opened or after checking the peep hole it is kept closed should a security issue arise while one of the pilots is out of the cockpit.
The last thing we need is airliners that can be remote controled, at the moment it takes a highly motivated individual to hijack an airliner who will have the knowlage that it is highly likely the outcome will be a chest full of 9mm from a man in black, start remote controlling aircraft and it opens the airlines to to all sorts of Internet crime from those too remote to be caught.
Talk of psychological yearly checks is true, that friendly chat with the AME when doing your annual medical is much more than a friendly chat, upon discovering that my wife was in the final stages of a terminal illness I had quite a long talk with the AME, no doubt to probing for clinical depression as apposed to my unhappiness with the situation. Also some good advice was given especially about dealing with the situation and not reaching for the bottle when you get low. With this in mind I found that if I did feel like a drink I reached instead for the tea pot and my alcohol intake ( that was always low) fell to nil if I was alone and not much in social situations.
I an quite lucky the the people who a fly for have been supportive but not intrusive during this time but one airline has had a very serious incident with its lack of care of a flight crew member following a bereavement.
Some of the attitudes to pilots, pay to fly, big training debts, long hours, and the agresive, hostile attitude of security staff ramp up the pressure on pilots do not help matters, EASA should be utterly ashamed of its self for the latest FTL rules , how they have the cheek to keep the word “safety” in their title I will never know.
It will of course be replaced by the fear of the remote connection being hacked by terrorists.
Fear? That’s a reality! With remotely controlled aircraft the hijackers don’t even have to be aboard the aircraft. That is a really, really, really bad idea.
What’s your line of work?
In geriatric patients, bifocals/varifocals are generally believed to cause falls as a result of visual distortion. Helicopter accidents, in particular, have also been blamed on varifocals. With Monovision, I guess the risk is that if you get a speck in an eye, you are left with good vision in one eye only. Whilst I believe you can get an NPPL medical with one good eye, most of us here have a class 2 medical or better and our insurance premiums, privileges etc.. will be based on that.
Optometrists are members of a college and can be struck off for negligence. If you found that the spectacles you’d ordered were unsatisfactory, you could easily put in a vexatious complaint that would make life miserable for whoever had succumbed. and if a reasonable body of opinion felt that a prescription was silly and you had an accident, you could probably sue for damages on the grounds that the accident was caused by distortions/deficiencies in your vision due to the inadvisable prescription. You might not personally do either of these things, but for most people in the medical/allied professions complaints are fairly common and cause an immense amount of grief, even when vexatious, leading to conformity and defensive practice.
If you had trouble with a circuit breaker popping and ordered your aircraft engineer to fit a bigger (incorrect) circuit breaker I sincerely hope they’d refuse. The customer isn’t always right. Even without a professional body and risk of censure, I don’t think you can force a business to supply something they feel is inadvisable.
Well, erm, no they don’t. A second opinion is a fine idea, but if someone has studied for 3/4 years to be an optician and thinks something you’re proposing is inadvisable, they have every right not to do as you tell them.
No, he/she doesn’t. In fact the optician who checked my eyes tried just that. Until I told her who was the client – me. End of story. An optician can advise but cannot make a judgment call. An ophthalmologist can. But hey, in the UK every little shit thinks he/she’s important. Just don’t let them get away with it.
Wasn’t a certain drone landed in iran that way not so long ago?
Almost certainly this problem will go away in time, when we have fully automated, and pilotless aircraft.
It will of course be replaced by the fear of the remote connection being hacked by terrorists.
Putting people with zero demonstrated capability into schools intended to put them in an airliner without first demonstrating they are tough enough for the job is a dumb idea to me.
I might have said this before, but the MPL seems like a very strange license to me. The holder can be co-pilot on commercial flights with transport category aircraft, but can not be PIC for a private flight in the SEP trainer (s)he learned to fly in!
There is only one reasonable solution: fit toilets in the cockpit. Many airlines have done that in the past, so it’s just a question of money.
That seems pretty sensible I also like the idea of keeping commercial pilots out of large airliner cockpits until they have a reasonable amount of hours doing something else – like military or lower end commercial GA work. Putting people with zero demonstrated capability into schools intended to put them in an airliner without first demonstrating they are tough enough for the job is a dumb idea to me. It sets up an expectation on all sides from day one, instead of a meritocracy in which only a fraction adequately prove themselves capable over time, through independent achievements. What’s needed to maintain that situation is high enough pay driving airliners to motivate people to prove themselves in lower paid jobs.
No medical exam or airline screening process will ever work as well as making people prove they’re up to the job in the real world.
