CatYaaak said:
Nice little saying, I agree completely. But are you implying in all your years of flying that you, or any member of this board, never learned that being complacent can bite you in the a$$? "To learn" something means you were ignorant of a certain fact until some form of teaching was injected which enhanced your knowledge or increased your judgement. These incidents reinforce what we know...please don't try to pretend you don't already.
One more thing..you state that my attitude is typical of the "can't happen to me" mentality, despite my repeated assurances that I don't (and haven't ever) held it. Before I become your "bad-attitude straw man" just because I'll come out and say those NWA guys just got complecent and it bit them, perhaps you should re-read a little yourself.
OK, I took your advice and re-read your posts from the beginning, looking for the point where we got crossed.
I found:
CatYaaak said:
(to 320AV8R)
If I ever land at the wrong airport you can be amused at me.
CatYaaak said:
(to 320AV8R)
But I don't think there's much to learn from landing at the wrong airport....say, why don't we just call for what it is....."getting lost". They got lost and didn't even know it. Sure it'll happen again, but I don't think "learning" is involved, since we ALL know how to avoid this at this stage. It does, however, highlight and reinforce something about complacency that we already know well through experience or example. It'll bite you in the a$$!
CatYaaak said:
(to me)
Things like backing up approaches, never thinking of something as "garden variety" or a "milk run"....these are FUNDAMENTAL aspects and attitudes of even BASIC airmanship, and if anyone here hasn't heard/learned this from Day 1 then they've beeing living on Mars. One doesn't "un-learn" the dangers of complacency, they aren't ignorant at the time of getting bitten....they're guilty of it. If people weren't ever guilty, it wouldn't even be an issue. For that NW crew, given their equip and no doubt wealth of experience there really is no other answer.
To paraphrase and summarize, "IF I ever land at the wrong airport, you can laugh at me, there's nothing to learn from landing at the wrong airport, the only possible cause would be complacency, and the NWA crew was obviously complacent." Now, I realize I can't divine your attitude with 100% accuracy, but the words you use serve as something of a window into your attitude. These words are typical of the "it can't happen to me" mentality.
Now, I did notice a subtle message here that perhaps you've intended to broadcast all along and I missed. IS it your position that the lesson can only be learned once, and after that only reinforced? If such is the case, and if everyone in this audience, from 1.5 hour student to 15,000 Major Captain has already learned this particular lesson, then nobody can learn it again - - it can only be reinforced? If that's the semantic distinction you want to make, I suppose we're in agreement to a degree.
If a lesson can only be learned once (I'll play along to get along) and thereafter only reinforced, then you're right. I had already learned it, as have most of us on the forum, and I dare say all of us who fly for a living. According to that model, we could only have the lesson reinforced. We should be careful in the future, then, to say "Lesson reinforced" where we have been accustomed to saying "Lesson learned." Ill bet, though, there may be a reader or two that has never considered the possibility of two airports being so similar in appearance and so close in proximity as to ever fool a pilot into landing at the wrong one. For them, the lesson can be learned for the first time. Oops, I slipped. Learned for the first time, in this structure, is redundant, right? I'll rephrase. Some people learned a lesson from the NWA crew's mistake.
If indeed you are hanging your objection to the "lesson learned" assertion on this subtle semantic structure, I find it all the more curious that you failed to see the difference between the FAR incident being a "good thing" (your words) and there being a "good thing" come out of the FAR incident (320AV8R's words). You needn't explain your thinking there, I just find it curious.
CatYaaak said:
FO: "Wow _____ (taxiing in), look at all those helicopters parked over there".
CPT ___: "OH SH#T!"
FSS (a few minutes later after airborne...again): "Yeah, we figured you guys were over there."
Of course...this is just supposin'.
A FedEx 727 crew made a landing at the wrong airport, and subsequently decided to take-off and fly to the correct destination. The REAL trouble came when they took off without a Dispatch Release.
