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A father of two must decide where to spend his time: home or work.
Faced with fulfilling his military duty or avoiding endanger lives, a U.S. Coast Guard captain must make a decision with no time for deliberation.
As an Air Force lieutenant colonel, Jack commands a squadron of fighter-bombers. Like other squadron commanders in his wing, he is concerned about safety. While the record is not terrible, there have been aircraft accidents and many close calls recently. Something is out of kilter.
So when he is promoted to squadron commander—in charge of 25 pilots, 25 navigators, and 300 maintenance and ground personnel—Jack takes a different approach. Every Friday afternoon he convenes his 50 fliers in the Squadron's Bar. To pay for refreshments they each plunk down a dollar on the pool table for each mistake or close call they had while flying. And then they talk for hours, freely and frankly, about what is going on in the squadron and how to improve safety. Jack has just one standing rule: amnesty. Whatever is said within the room is to be held in confidence; nobody gets in trouble for admitting they have made an error while flying.
In the months that follow, the conversation is open and direct. Lots of issues, big and small, come to the surface concerning management, personnel, maintenance, regulations, and everything else. Jack begins to notice the hoped-for change: His squadron's safety record rises higher and higher in comparison to other squadrons in his wing.
Then one Friday a pilot recounts an experience he had earlier that week during what should have been a routine flight. He was flying in formation when the lead plane peeled off into a turn too soon. Having only seconds to adjust to the confusion, he lost his bearings—experiencing what is known among fliers as "spatial disorientation." When he came out of that potentially fatal condition, his plane was soaring upwards into the clouds, far from the formation. Deeply shaken, he headed back to the base, landed, and went home for the day.
Jack thinks the conversation that Friday, regarding ways the whole squadron could work together to prevent such situations, is particularly good. But he also knows that spatial disorientation is such a serious problem that the Air Force requires any such incidents to be reported up the chain of command. When the circumstances leading to these types of incidences are investigated, there is usually discipline and retraining involved. Yet Jack has offered amnesty—which is the reason, he is sure, that the pilot had been willing to speak frankly. A few days later his superior calls him in. One of the officers at the bar that day has broken the confidence and told the commanding general what had happened. "What are you going to do?" Jack's superior asks him.Read more dilemmas: Military Dilemmas
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