Culture - "the way we do things round here".
"Culture" is a major factor in air safety. It is also subject to generalisations which often over-simplify the situation, and fail to recognise that there are many sub-sets to be considered, including both the overall "pilot" population, and groups of pilots at the national and airline level.
Unfortunately, some of these "cultural" factors are major obstacles to improving the "crew-caused" approach and landing accident rate. This could be achieved by simple changes to operating procedures, but these are rejected out of hand by many who fail to understand the reasoning behind them.
To many non-pilots, the solution to a lot of the problems leading to crew-caused approach and landing accidents is quite obvious.
- If poorly planned or managed approaches are the issue, surely the Captain should be managing the flight, rather than "driving the vehicle"? After all, the Captain of an ocean liner doesn't do the steering!
- In poor visibility, why is the Captain relying on the First Officer for hints about whether he can see enough to land? Shouldn't he devote his attention to this critical task, when the F/O is quite capable of flying an approach and going around when necessary?
- If many accidents occur when the First Officer is unable to correct mistakes by the Captain, but both can "fly" the aircraft, shouldn't the Captain normally be supervising the First Officer, not the other way round?
In other words, why aren't most airlines using "monitored approaches" ("PicMA") at night and in IMC, as the CFIT Training Aid suggests?
The answer is perhaps in the thorny issue of "culture". Culture can be described as "the methods a group of people have developed to deal with issues", or "how we do things around here".
While almost everyone who has actually evaluated alternative procedures concurs that "monitored approach" provides the more effective resolution to these problems, the majority of the flight operations community has not, and remains in ignorance of it. Consequently the general consensus seems to be that more and better "across-the-board" CRM training to achieve more effective monitoring, plus more EGPWS and other technology, are the routes to cutting crew-caused accidents.
But so far, these just haven't worked well enough to remove these accidents and incidents. Despite all the emphasis on CRM training to change behaviour, many pilot error accidents arise from carrying on doing things the same way as before. In other words, CRM training still hasn't altered "the way we do things round here" or "culture" in much of the industry.
Resistance and antipathy to new ideas are responsible for the continuation of many accidents - but not always in the way that seems to be commonly accepted in the industry. This section of the site looks at this issue.