Moral dilemma

There comes a time in every pilots career where you see something being done that is just not quite in the realm of legality. Typically airline interview questions are loaded with the "what if" scenarios. Like "what if its Christmas eve and you notice a Nav light out? There is nobody around to fix it and the plane is full of passengers. What do you do?" I'm not an interviewer, so I don't know what they are looking for, but I think they are going to see if you will bend a reg or not. Out on the line, I'm guessing that the flight would go. In the interview you tell them you wouldn't go. That leads me to my discussion of the day. Legality, morality and ethics.

Recently I have been faced with a real life "what if scenario" from interview questions. I'm not going to go into specific detail in order to C.M.A., but I will talk about some of the decisions I've had to make. What it all boils down to is that something shady was done that I didn't agree with. It had nothing to do with the safety of flight, but it did brush up against a technicality. It is something that has been done in the past and its normally not a big deal, but this time it not only effected the current crew, but any crews that flew the plane later. What the captain did was pretty egregious. Now I had a decision to make. Do I go to the chief pilot with this information that I know concerning this captain, or do I keep my mouth shut and just let it go? On one hand, I don't want to rat on a fellow pilot. On the other, I have an obligation to my fellow pilots in the company to make sure they don't get in trouble for something that this captain did. I had to think long and hard about my next move.

As pilots we tend to be task oriented. We have a flight that needs to get from point A to point B and be damned if we aren't going to make it there. Our basic mentality is to complete the flight. It is only after we take a look at all the factors involved in making the flight that we make our "go or no go" decision. In our niche of flying there are tremendous pressures to lean towards making a go decision. Some of us "Freight Dogs" want to show what bad ass pilots we are by making it to the destinations in the worst of weather and under the harshest of conditions. We see it as a little badge of honor that we made it in while others did not. It is a reputation that freight dogs have earned through the years with many lives and aircraft lost due to "get there itis". We are also financially motivated to complete the flights. If we don't fly, we don't get paid. So when making our go or no go decision, we are sometimes pressured to flirt with technicalities in order to complete a flight.

There are many regulations that pilots must adhere to. There are some pilots that are super sticklers for the regs and follow them to the letter. There are others who take a more laid back approach to interpreting the regs. It all depends on the pilots personality. I think a pilots personality will play a role in what kind of professional ethics that person will have. So given my current dilemma, I have to question my professional ethics. What do I stand for? What is the right thing to do? Not only for myself, but for the good of my fellow pilots and the company. Do I let this slide? Do I potentially get a captain in trouble? I'll let you know what happened in my next post.