Scudrunners

With nothing exciting to think about I was thinking about my flying career and what the easiest and safest flying job I had was.

It was easy to make that decision because it was fire bombing beyond any doubt.

The highest risk was flying in the Sahara Desert during the Harmatten storms season.

And the most boring was flying in the air show circuit in Europe.

The best job was aerial application.

The only job that I can think of that would be better than aerial application would be quality control in a high class whore house.

So how about the rest of you people out there, what were your choices?

I'm an outlier, because I believe that safety comes from using [i]knowledge[/i] to make good decisions,
and using [i]skill[/i] to implement them.  Without knowledge and skill, there cannot be safety.

Safety does not come from a stack of paper, or processes, both of which can be neatly circumvented
by a crafty @sshole trying (and succeeding) to cut corners, all the while claiming that they are ISO 9000
compliant.  Anything non-trivial is too complex to be completely codified.  The bureaucrats will lie and tell
you that they can, but that's just their bullshit rhetoric, trying to justify their jobs and power.

It's not just a fucking job.  It's a personal commitment to be the very best you can, and to do the very best
job you can do, even if it's not always the easy thing to do.  It sounds corny and trite, but those are words
to live by - in any industry.

A personal commitment to excellence may be an outdated 20th century concept, but it has served me very,
very well in my lifetime.

Without a doubt the safest job is my current one as a 4-bar [size=8pt]TM.[/size]

It's very easy to say no, based upon what is already written down in the FOM or other manuals. We also have programs in which we can lean on if we deem it unsafe and say "no."

Then again, the flying we do is very boring.  However,... I still find satisfaction in the various things we do.  A crosswind landing that is smooth as glass. Mentoring a new person is rewarding in its own right.

[quote]the flying we do is very boring[/quote]

As revenue flight should be.  That is necessary, but not sufficient.  It is crucial to
continue to challenge yourself, and expand your personal envelope, during non-
revenue flight.

That is the difference between steak and hamburger in the cockpit.

Nark:  you were a cop once.  Tell me about cops that had checked out, didn't stay
in shape, and didn't do the optional driving and shooting courses, and were just
mailing it in until retirement.

Meeting bare minimums is extremely dangerous.

My safest flying job was probably my first: Class 4 at a small, dying flight school.  I did mostly intro flights, only ever flew in good weather, hardly flew anyways, and since I was new at it I knew everything.

[quote]It was easy to make that decision because it was fire bombing beyond any doubt.[/quote]

I should explain why it was the safest, it was because at any time all I had to do was push a button and within about two seconds I had an empty airplane which would fly just fine on one engine if I had to shut one down.

[quote author=Colonel Sanders link=topic=10320.msg29840#msg29840 date=1577990129]
[quote]the flying we do is very boring[/quote]
Nark:  you were a cop once.  Tell me about cops that had checked out, didn't stay
in shape, and didn't do the optional driving and shooting courses, and were just
mailing it in until retirement.

Meeting bare minimums is extremely dangerous.
[/quote]

I was a volunteer, never a sworn LEO in Canada. I do some LEO stuff here in the US, and you can tell who skate by and those who practice between qualifying sessions.

The same can be said to the FO's I'm paired with during my annual PC.  I've come across a few that haven't opened the book since the year prior, and don't remember how to run an Airbus ECAM. It's painful to watch. One in particular asked me where it was written down in the manual as we were in the van going to the sim for the check ride. This in spite of about an hour debrief by the sim instructor, and with me the night prior at the hotel bar grabbing a bite. This dude had ~14ish hours to find the sentence which is in chapter 1, paragraph 1. (or could have taken our word....)

You can imagine how well that went...