Aviation professionalism: Why we can’t go back to basics

Recently, we've heard a lot about a lack of professionalism in all sectors of aviation. Professional pilots landing on taxiways, drunk in the cockpit and overflying destinations while playing with their laptop computers. It has been a bad few weeks, but these high visibility outcomes are very likely just the tip of a much more dangerous iceberg.

On November 4th, FAA Administrator Randy Babbitt said “there is an extreme need to refocus on professionalism" citing the "sad example" of the crew who "lost total situational awareness" and overflew their intended destination with an airliner full of passengers. "I can't regulate professionalism," he lamented. "With everything we know about human factors, there are still those who just ignore the common-sense rules of safety." A year ago, U.S. Air Force Chief of Staff General Norton Schwartz echoed a similar concern following an embarrassing string of incidents in his organization related to nuclear weapons handling. In a speech in October 2008, General Schwartz, said "We collectively need to back a little bit toward something called compliance. We must, do the right thing and do the right thing right. That's as simple as it gets."

Administrator Babbitt and General Schwartz both point to the key aspect of this challenge and any potential solution – it revolves around personal integrity, accepting responsibility for our actions, and a willingness to hold ourselves and our peers to professional standards. But these are not simple fixes because words like integrity, responsibility and standards are not standard issue in modern society.

The way we never were

There has been a lot of discussion in aviation circles in recent weeks about a need “to get back to basics.” That won’t work.

Our society (in general) and aviation specifically, has never been really serious about compliance. We pay lip service to trite phrases like “an uncompromising commitment to safety” but then go about business as usual, with frequent errors and casual violations. The attitude seems to be “so far no harm, therefore no foul” – and no real need to change.

According to the Josephson Institute of Ethics, a non-profit think tank that has measured the ethical fitness of American youth since 1992, "the hole in the moral ozone seems to be getting bigger — each new generation is more likely to lie and cheat than the preceding one." In short, the gene pool from which we draw our pilots (and maintainers, support personnel, dispatchers, managers and executives) is in a state of moral decay. Administrator Babbitt called the recent events of unprofessional behavior "bumps in the road." But if the only fix is another call for a "return to professionalism," the road ahead will get rougher and more lethal.

The noncompliance problem is not getting better, it is getting worse. In the not too distant past, the pilot error/violation accident rate was blurred by other causes such as improper maintenance, component failure or weather. Now that the engineering and systems flaws have been aggressively addressed, the last flaw standing is the so-called “professional pilot.” To add to the problem, advances in technology have made the modern cockpit so error tolerant that a pilot can make literally hundreds of errors and commit scores of violations without serious consequence. Experience – once the great teacher – now teaches pilots that errors and violations don’t really matter. Unwittingly, we may have engineered ourselves into a culture of noncompliance.

The real reason a back to basics approach won't work is that we can’t go back to a place we have never been. If we are to seriously address the most foundational remaining cause of compromised safety, we must go forward to the basics, to create a cadre of professionals that don’t wink at noncompliance and who are willing to admit that we have some heavy lifting to do. Professional ethics is not a core skill for aviators, but it needs to be. Contrary to popular opinion, ethics is neither instinctive nor intuitive. It must be taught and learned until a common baseline is established and peer to peer accountability kicks in for real.

Although accurate self assessment and leveraging negative feedback are not core skills sets in most pilots, we all need a cold slap of reality if we hope to turn this around.

- We are not so good that an occasional violation of the sterile cockpit procedure is OK – ever
- We are not so good that we can take flight planning and preparation briefings for granted
- We are not so good that we can fly in a physiologically impaired state – either fatigued or from playing too close to the bottle to throttle time line

Maybe we are not so good – period.

Or perhaps, as a collective, we don’t have the moral fiber it will take to tackle this challenge at all - in which case, we are begging the regulator to step into our ethical vacuum. The first step must be overcoming the denial of the problem. Let’s face facts, far too many so called professionals operate on the fringes of compliance. There is a simple answer to this problem. Ethics for all - a serious train up of why compliance matters and how to engage in peer to peer empowered accountability. In the meantime, it is well past professional midnight and time for every aviator worth his or her salt to “man up,” look in the mirror, and then each other in the eye, and demand that we act like the professionals the world believes us to be.