At Flight Safety Foundation, we try to allocate our time to areas where the risk is the greatest, which means that we are spending an increasing amount of our time with smaller operators in high-growth areas around the world. Of course, they have a lot of the challenges you would expect, but a disturbing number of them have a challenge that nobody really wants to talk about. So I guess it is up to me to start the conversation.
The problem is similar to one the industry faced during the 1990s, known as the “cockpit authority gradient.” We carefully acknowledged the fact that this had a cultural component that varied in the different regions of the world. We talked about it because it was a big deal and had to be dealt with. Twenty-plus years later, the message has been heard, and to a great extent, that problem is being seriously addressed.
The new and unspoken problem is similar — let’s call it the “company authority gradient” — and it also has a bit of a cultural compo…
