A Culture of Blame
Contributed by: Captain Cargo

Saturday night, and we're cruising up to Brussels, and should be there in time to get a few drinks down us. Kevin, one of our younger first officers, is handling. He's pretty good considering his low hours. Fred, the flight engineer, who I seem to have been flying with a lot lately, is a grizzled old ex-RAF working class guy with bad hearing. He's telling Kevin the story of Gibson, the captain who went supersonic in a 727.

"Yeah, they found it went faster at high altitude with two degrees trailing edge flap selected. So they pulled the CB for the leading edge flaps and selected flap 2. This time, though, the flight engineer had gone for a leak when they pulled the CB. When he came back from the toilet, he saw what he thought was a popped CB and reset it. Out popped four of the leading edge devices, and you can imagine the rest."

"What happened?" Kevin asked.

"Well, the slats ripped off, asymmetrically, the aircraft rolled, and they went vertical. Lost 36000 feet in forty seconds, went supersonic. They recovered by putting the gear down. The aircraft was totally bent out of shape."

Kevin looked suitably awed. It was nice and smooth out tonight, the radio quiet, the autopilot coupled to the GPS.

"That's rubbish, Fred," I said, reaching for my bottle of water. "There's no way any sane crew member would pull a CB while the flight engineer is out of the cockpit. And not tell him when he came back? You think he wouldn't notice the flaps were out? And only slat 7 actually deployed, I believe."

He looked at me sideways.

"It's what the report said."

"The report said that, yes. And Gibson never flew a 727 again. He ended up back on Convairs or something. It's too easy to blame the pilot. The 727 was still a new type." We were given a frequency change, and I dialled up the numbers on our fancy new 833 compliant radios that sounded terrible, and checked in. It went quiet, Kevin playing with the GPS and Fred balancing fuel.

There was a worrying trend of blaming pilots for every accident in the Seventies and Eighties. Gibson is just one of many. Sometimes it's easier to blame an individual rather than an organisation. The individual can be replaced, but the organisation gets sued. There's the risk of a type getting grounded. There's been other cases of uncommanded leading edge device deployment on the 727, and in fact a captain with another company told me it had happened to him last year, luckily when he was low and slow.

The most disturbing thing about Gibson, though, is wondering how he felt when he walked into a crew room, having flown his clapped out Convair into some remote regional airstrip, and hearing those whispers:

"Hey. That's Gibson. The guy who screwed the pooch."

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