This rings true. I live in Doha and a very good family friend is an instructor in the local flag carrier's training program.
He was recently bemoaning the following situation:
1. There was a go-around on some flight or other (for good reason!)
2. Management interpreted this as a failure, and announced that every go-around will now have a full post-mortem with involved pilots requiring more sim time.
3. Pilots now think go-arounds are now off-limits. Oops!
This is a very, very common pattern in the Middle East. When the waterfall goes as planned, service is excellent. When exceptions happen, management freaks out and adds more layers of regulation to make sure the exception can't happen again, failing to recognize that exceptions are sometimes good. For benign stuff like customer service, you get frustrated customers. For important stuff like air safety... well, you end up with close calls or crashed airplanes.
Centralized decision making is a hell of drug.
He was recently bemoaning the following situation:
1. There was a go-around on some flight or other (for good reason!)
2. Management interpreted this as a failure, and announced that every go-around will now have a full post-mortem with involved pilots requiring more sim time.
3. Pilots now think go-arounds are now off-limits. Oops!
This is a very, very common pattern in the Middle East. When the waterfall goes as planned, service is excellent. When exceptions happen, management freaks out and adds more layers of regulation to make sure the exception can't happen again, failing to recognize that exceptions are sometimes good. For benign stuff like customer service, you get frustrated customers. For important stuff like air safety... well, you end up with close calls or crashed airplanes.
Centralized decision making is a hell of drug.