To carry on for Hugh, I'm a professional engineer also, and maybe some of you in this room are engineers. Every month I get a magazine sent to me with the blue pages. Those blue pages show where some engineer has done a no-no and has been sanctioned, either financially or with his licence--which is a privilege, ladies and gentlemen. His licence is temporarily, and sometimes permanently, removed, as I think is the case with many professional associations. I've talked to a few doctors, and they certainly have their own internal system. When people do things that are inappropriate, they have a system for dealing with it. And that's what I am proposing.
In the future, if we go towards a system of SMS, again, I personally support the concept of it.... A licence is a privilege; it's not a right. It's the licensed people out there doing the work who know what's going on. They need that whistle-blowing protection to be able to report things comfortably so that it becomes normal to do so.
Without overstating the case, in a couple of companies I worked for in the past, I put my job on the line at least twice that I can recall. I simply wouldn't do things that I guess other pilots in the company were doing, such as going below limits. I could do it, but I thought it was unwise. I didn't consider myself good enough to be able to fly like that or to take an airplane that was in violation of its limitations from point A to point B. I can distinctly remember a case where that happened. I refused to do it, and I put my job on the line. Maybe I was lucky, but I felt I had other qualifications to do other things. Other pilots feel they can't and that they have to do certain things they don't want to do.
I don't know if that answers your question. You were talking about the difference between an absolute level of safety, an ultimate level of safety, and some acceptable level of safety. I think I would agree with you that it's a very difficult question to answer.