Steve Montague had been flying for the airline about two years when he decided to let his captain be wrong.
He was paired with a captain who shut him down every time he offered anything. Asked about routing around a thunderstorm 80 miles out, the captain told him he would say when he had made a decision. Told that maintenance had been called for a burned-out light, which federal regulation required, the captain told him to ask permission next time. On their third trip together that month, descending into Albuquerque, Montague watched the airspeed sit at 300 knots below 10,000 feet, where the limit is 250. He saw it. He said nothing.
The captain caught it himself. Nothing bad happened. But Montague calls it the least proud professional moment of his career, and it still bothers him decades later. What bothered him was not the chewing out. It was that he had let his pettiness exceed his professionalism.
Montague is a retired American Airlines 787 captain and check airman, a former Navy F-14 pilot, and has spent years bringing crew resource management into patient safety work at more than 100 hospitals. In this episode he explains what he told every crew before every flight, why fear and futility are an incomplete list of reasons people stay quiet, and why the response to the first person who speaks up sets the price for everyone after them.
Full episode page, video, and transcript: https://markgraban.com/mistake364