I’m curious as to what actually happens when there’s a “pilot deviation” and the pilot has to copy down and call a number. Do these deviations show up on the pilot’s record? If the deviation is bad enough, can the pilot be suspended or possibly fired? I’ve been watching some videos on YouTube . . .
When the pilot calls the number they’ll be talking to an ATC supervisor, probably the one on duty in that facility when the event occurred. Those folks aren’t traffic cops, but they’re also not neutral observers either. So it’s a bit of a cat-and-mouse game.
Many deviations constitute minor goofs that have no real consequences in the outside world. Those tend to be settled by the phone call and that’s it. That also applies to the cases where the pilot convinces the supervisor that ATC’s perception of the situation both then and now was erroneous and nothing wrong actually happened.
More commonly the ATC folks end up saying “This is a big enough deal that my procedures require me to report it upwards, so you’d better prepare to be investigated by the enforcement arm of FAA.”
If the pilot is a non-professional, it’s time to find an aviation attorney and be prepared to fight a giant bureaucracy who can suspend or revoke your license and also levy fines. Sorta like an IRS audit, but worse.
If the pilot works for a major or semi-major operator, they may have an ASAP program which is a joint effort of the FAA, the employer, and the pilot union if there is one.
The basic tenet of which is that mistakes aren’t crimes. And that overall systemic safety is enhanced when mistakes of whatever nature can be acknowledged, tracked, and if necessary systemic changes made to reduce the likelihood of recurrence.
Rather than the natural alternative that mistakes are covered up, hidden, or simply result in punitive firings and career-ending license revocations while whatever circumstances led to the mistake sit out there unchanged, ever-ready to trap the next insufficiently wary pilot or controller.
Under ASAP, in exchange for telling the whole truth, warts and all, you’re assured that mistakes can’t be punished by FAA or employers. Bad workmanship such as recklessness, unreasonable ignorance of regulations, or disregard of published procedures are not protected. But basic brain-farts, which constitute the vast majority of anomalies, are covered. As are the all-too common situations of “They think they said ‘A’, I thought they said ‘B’, and the reality as best we can tell is they really said ‘C’”.
A successful outcome from an investigation under the auspices of ASAP is a letter from the FAA enforcement department amounting to: “Thanks for being forthright with us. Now go forth and be careful out there.”
An unsuccessful outcome from an investigation under the auspices of ASAP leads to the bad-cop side of the deal: a follow-on adversarial investigation, an adversarial hearing in front of an FAA judge with FAA prosecutors, with your license and hence your livelihood on the line. Better lawyer up!
Note that ATC controllers are subject to the same sorts of investigations when it appears they’ve screwed up. And controllers have a mirror-image program to ASAP called ATSAP:
As an aside, professional pilots file ASAP reports frequently. They’re not just for screw-ups or perceptions of screw-ups. They’re for anything we notice that either did go a bit sideways, or could have done so had we been slightly less on the ball that day. I file about 1 per month and have for decades now. The vast majority of my reports are not CYA.
Here’s a real world example that I was involved in as a Part 135 (charter) pilot:
Flying a bizjet, we were taking off from a major airport and mistook a radio call intended for an airliner as an instruction for us. This led us to climb above our cleared altitude. This did not lead to any traffic conflict, or even any hurry to us or ATC. We were simply given a new heading to fly and that was it. No request to call anybody.
But… we knew immediately that we would be submitting ASAP reports and would be dealing with this for some weeks. I immediately wrote down the time in both local and Zulu because on those reports you end up having to note it repeatedly.
So at the end of the day in our respective hotel rooms my partner and I submitted our separate reports. These were later accepted by the FAA, but we also had several company meetings and reports to do.
In the end, it was recognized that this is a fairly common trap and it was exacerbated by the airliner’s call sign sounding a bit similar to our own. I was the flying pilot at the time (meaning, not working the radios), but even so I was asked how this slipped past us both. Part of this process is also proposing what you’ll do differently in the future.
In the ten or so ASAPs I’ve ever filed, this was the only one where I kind of shrugged. This wasn’t the first or last time a pilot would get fooled by a similar call sign. Yes, I was listening - and if I had heard it differently than my partner I would most certainly have challenged it. But I didn’t. It happens.
I see the moral of this story as follows: This is why aviation is so safe. Even a minor error resulting from a well-known scenario that causes no conflict still gets investigated carefully. Data was gathered rather than being swept under the rug, as it should be. I wish other industries (I’m looking at you law enforcement and medicine) would do the same.
And, the person who made the error was the one who initiated the investigation process.
Which, as noted by LSL, is exactly how the system is designed. If it were purely punitive there would be no incentive to self-report, and every incentive to cover it up.
Also, it was both of us as a crew, not just one person. Part of that is if one of us makes a report, the other sort of has to. But I think it’s also part of the sense of professionalism we have in the pilot culture. We don’t generally tolerate poor performance, and we recognize how crucial it is to gather data.
Comparing it to baseball, we don’t expect anyone to bat a thousand. But if your average goes below what’s expected of a professional, somebody is going to say something. Once again, I wish that were so in law enforcement, where the incentives seem to be to both cover up and tolerate poor performance in peers.
The pilots memory may be better trusted if it is captured earlier rather than later.
and If it is from before they can learn from other people the full situation.
eg What if he was aware of a some other communication which switches things around. Did he really know of it at the time of “suspected deviation” or did his colleagues tell him about the earlier instruction so as to give him that excuse ?