One of the pillars of modern aviation safety, cockpit resource management was introduced to commercial aviation more than two decades ago. Among other things, CRM was meant to draw the curtain on the era of the submissive copilot and flight engineer cowed by an overbearing “gear up, shut up” captain. It also addressed the disturbing incidence of three-pilot airline crews, nursing deep grievances born of unwanted post-deregulation mergers, refusing to speak to each other on the flight deck.
In aviation, silence is golden only under the flight path and in the comforts of an aircraft’s cabin, and CRM encourages everyone in the cockpit, regardless of seniority, to work together and speak up if they see something that strikes them as amiss, questionable, wrong, illegal, stupid, negligent or any other troubling adjective that could create a hazard or confusion. Post-9/11 security billboards have adopted this theme too: “If you see something, say something.”
