2 hours ago, jice said:
Yeah… dude. Play the game. Protect yourself. But if an evaluator is leaning on that game or focusing on queepy, non-mission-related things: that evaluator is a non-mission-enhancing waste of time and the org and/or process is broke. The organization should weed those humans out and fix those processes, not punish folks for failing to waste their life on behalf of a MAJCOM 3V staffer’s ego.
Yeah, still protect yourself when you go to the airline. Common sense. But the FAA doesn’t work for your airline; that douchey FAA jump-seater isn’t paid to care whether your airline is effective at its job. That should be the MAJCOM’s only concern if they’re sitting in my co*ckpit.
Yeah, great in theory, except in practice what you are describing is how complacency festers. There's always an excuse for why this rule isn't that important or you don't really have to follow that reg, or yeah maybe you're supposed to do it that way but does it really matter?
Complacent squadrons with mishaps don't consciously create an environment that is ripe for catastrophe. There isn't some dipsh*t who walks in saying "I can't wait to break the rules and eventually lead to calamity." I don't say this as some evaluator who had a boner for downgrading people. I say this as someone who is reflexively anti-authoritarian and always looking for a reason to do something differently. And that little sh*t adds up in your brain and builds the habit pattern of excusing regulatory deviance. Then when something goes wrong, or you screw something up, or something unplanned puts you in a position where the easier answer is to violate or keep violating the regulation, that habit pattern kicks in. It only has to kick in for a few minutes or seconds to put you in a position you would have assumed prior to the flight you wouldn't find yourself in. I remember this conflict when stabilized approach criteria came out.
Maybe you've been able to shake the bonds of human nature, but the rest of us mortals are very much susceptible to all the things that created the need for these regulations in the first place. It is the literal function of the evaluator to enforce the regulations as they are written, and as we all remember from training, these regulations are written in blood. Including the blood of whatever dipsh*t had his finger degloved because he was wearing a wedding ring. Expecting the evaluators to have a secondary set of unwritten regulations that discriminate between "queep" rules and the ones that actually matter is easy to say with a beer in your hand, but very difficult to do when you're the one enforcing the standards. When I got downgraded on my T-6 instructor check ride for taking my mask off right after takeoff, it wasn't the evaluator's fault. I was the dummy.
Does that mean guys should be sent to an FEB for wearing a wedding ring on a regular flight? Obviously not, considering I don't think pilots should be punished foruncharacteristicmistakes that might result in damage to the aircraft or person either. Sometimes you just have a hard landing. If it's not a trend, just debrief it.
But if you can't play the game with an evaluator then it's very difficult to imagine that same person isn't applying their own layer of judgment subconsciously to all sorts of regulations day-to-day. Again, I speak from experience, not as the judge and jury. And it's not a moral judgment on that person. There are stupid rules. The real question is, are you violating the rule because it's keeping you from accomplishing the mission, or just because you think it's dumb/inconvenient? In my experience 99.9% of the time it's the latter, and while that may absolutely be true, the obvious follow-up question is "why not just take the f*cking ring off?"
It's funny, as I get dangerously close to 40 I finally understand why the majors and lieutenant colonels in the squadron all wore the damn reflective belt when we were on the flight line in Bagram. When I was younger and dumber and always looking for a fight I just thought they were sellouts or too afraid of getting in trouble. Now I realize that as you get older and more boring, which I absolutely am, you simply perform a more logical calculation:
Is the reflective belt actually stopping me from doing anything in any way? No? *shrug* I guess I'll wear it then, not my circus, not my clowns.
Anyway that's a really long-winded way of saying that the purpose of a majcom evaluator is literally to make sure *all* of the rules are being followed, and anybody flying with them should be smart enough to know that. And if you can't understand that, it's not the evaluator with their head up their ass. It's the job of the DO, the squadron evaluator, and the instructor pilots to determine whether or not a pilot is failing at the actual "important" sh*t. If you're waiting for a majcom evaluator to make sure you can perform the basic squadron mission, things have already gotten pretty bad.
Edited by Lord Ratner
