Pilot deviations and a new FAA reality

"Chip Jones" wrote
Folks, I see at *least* one pilot deviation a week working traffic in my
small slice of the NAS.

Breaking news story - pilots are human and make mistakes. In other
news, the sun rose this morning.

I don't report them unless separation is lost,
because I was trained under the "no harm, no foul" mentality.

And frankly, I think that's an inherently wrong approach. These
deviation should be reported and tracked - because by studying them
(not as individual deviations but as patterns and trends) we might
discover a lot of things. We might discover what sorts of
circumstances significantly increase the likelihood of a deviation.
We might discover which kinds of deviations are most likely to lead to
an accident, by knowing how often the different ones occur. We might
learn a lot of things.

But we won't, because the people who will receive these reports of
deviation are a bunch of useless bloody loonies (to quote Douglas
Adams) and the only thing they will use these reports of pilot
deviation to do is bust pilots they don't like.

Therefore, your "no harm, no foul" approach is really for the best -
because anything else really will do nothing but create an adversarial
relationship between pilots and controllers with no benefit
whatsoever.

Michael