Well, the reason for deviation from standards is always a fair question. As a baseline, it’s worth noting that deviations from a standard can be acceptable, valuable, and safety-enhancing, depending on circumstances. The idea of a standard is that it’s normally the best practice; but that doesn’t mean there aren’t sometimes reasons to modify a procedure. If you’ve been around the industry for any length of time, you’ve certainly seen standards change. Clearly this isn’t license for anyone to do whatever they want; consideration must be given to whether the safety benefit of modifying a procedure outweighs the negatives of deviating from an existing standard - the “cost / benefit analysis.”
What you need to understand about this verbaige is that it was instituted when these RNAV-off-the-runway procedures were first created, back in the early 2000s. Prior to this, a departure was either flown as a heading, or direct to a fix. The concept of complex procedures involving multiple close-in turns off closely spaced parallel runways was new, because the technology was just becoming commonplace enough in a majority of airline aircraft to make use of it.
So, two obvious threats here: newer equipment / required tolerances (there are always growing pains when humans have to adopt the use of new technology), and decades-old habit patterns of much of the commercial pilot population at that time. These two factors equaled a risk that was deemed higher than acceptable that a crew would eventually mis-program the FMC. There are a number of easily identifiable scenarios in which this could happen.
As a result, it was decided that a simple last verification would be made during the takeoff clearance; typically the last thing that happens before takeoff. This verbiage is not a clearance or a departure instruction by the way, and thus does not violate the ICAO standard of minimizing multiple instructions in a takeoff clearance… it is a simple final verification that the controller, the pilots, and the FMC are all in agreement about where the airplane is going. It does not exist at every airport using RNAV procedures, only at high-density airports with complex simultaneous parallel departures very little extra spacing. The ones that come to mind are KLAX, KATL, and KDFW. Does KORD have it too? Maybe.
I was new in my first airline check airman position at this time, and the whole thing received a lot of attention. This is not some backwards procedure in lieu of threat and error management; it IS an application of TEM. A threat was anticipated, and a procedure was implemented to recognize and trap an error with the potential to be a higher than normal safety risk. That’s exactly how TEM is supposed to work. There’s no reason to expect it to be constrained to the cockpit only, and in this case there’s added benefit to involving ATC as well.
In the final analysis, this seems a procedure of obvious value at basically no cost. It doesn’t meaningfully change standardization. It’s difficult to understand what exactly you see as a negative here?
. If its an RNAV departure you fly it RNAV, if its a conventional departure, you either fly it conventional or RNAV and crosscheck using raw data.
