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This is orthogonal to the original argument, but yes, we should forgive pilot error, because mistakes are not necessarily a demonstration of incompetence. Life

This is orthogonal to the original argument, but yes, we should forgive pilot error, because mistakes are not necessarily a demonstration of incompetence. Life, and all subcomponents of life, is one giant ball of probabilities. Training, preparation, and planning all go towards decreasing the probability of undesirable events, but they do not rule them out entirely. This includes plane crashes, car crashes, or even scraping your knee. Professional football players don't play perfectly every game. Olympic athletes still make mistakes despite years of daily training. And you still have major bugs in your codebase - would you describe yourself as incompetent? Mistakes happen. Accidents happen. So long as we can confidently determine that it is accidental rather than systemic (i.e., incompetence), we learn from it and keep going. But nevermind all that. Let's hang a sign around their necks, parade them in the streets, let people throw things at them, and then execute them publicly.

goodcanadian 13y ago
Perhaps more to the point, no single error should ever destroy an aircraft. As the parent points out, people make mistakes. This is not news, and good systems (including aircraft) are designed to allow for that. So, even if pilot error was a contributing factor, I find it very hard to believe that nothing else went wrong. There were at least two people in the cockpit as well as controllers on the ground. No one was worried until a few seconds before the crash.
- sokoloff 13y ago
  Agree that a single, simple error has little chance to down a modern transport aircraft. It's almost always a chain of errors, each necessary but only jointly sufficient. I realize that not all the facts are in, and the NTSB full process will take quite some time, but I believe that once all the facts are in, you will find this to be a stunning display of lack of basic airmanship skills. Why would no one on the ground warn the flight? The altitude transmitted to ATC radar is in hundred foot increments and the high and fast on initial won't trigger an alert, once they pull the power off and try to capture the appropriate vertical profile, ATC radar has no information that anything is wrong, then when they start blowing through the vertical profile, there's not enough resolution to trigger a low altitude alert. More fundamentally perhaps, it's not ATC's job to fly the plane. ATC keeps planes separated; pilots fly them. On a clear-and-a-million day, and an 11,000 foot runway, the crew couldn't manage a visual approach. There was more than one error, but I think the NTSB findings on probable cause will overhwelminginly find the failures to be in the forward portion of the aircraft, immediately behind the yokes. (It is hard to fathom.)
rogerbinns 13y ago
Thankfully the NTSB and other accident investigators do not usually come out with a single easy cause in a newsbite size. They will examine lots of contributory factors, and they will come up with suggestions that fix those - typically dozens or more. In aviation they talk of "swiss cheese" theory - slices of cheese with holes in them. The idea is to have many in such a way as holes don't line up. As you say, a failure like this is not "pilot error" but rather a failure of the aviation system and that is what needs to be corrected for all aviation. The "pilot error" is a symptom of the problem, not the cause.

goodcanadian 13y ago

Perhaps more to the point, no single error should ever destroy an aircraft. As the parent points out, people make mistakes. This is not news, and good systems (including aircraft) are designed to allow for that. So, even if pilot error was a contributing factor, I find it very hard to believe that nothing else went wrong. There were at least two people in the cockpit as well as controllers on the ground. No one was worried until a few seconds before the crash.

sokoloff 13y ago
Agree that a single, simple error has little chance to down a modern transport aircraft. It's almost always a chain of errors, each necessary but only jointly sufficient. I realize that not all the facts are in, and the NTSB full process will take quite some time, but I believe that once all the facts are in, you will find this to be a stunning display of lack of basic airmanship skills. Why would no one on the ground warn the flight? The altitude transmitted to ATC radar is in hundred foot increments and the high and fast on initial won't trigger an alert, once they pull the power off and try to capture the appropriate vertical profile, ATC radar has no information that anything is wrong, then when they start blowing through the vertical profile, there's not enough resolution to trigger a low altitude alert. More fundamentally perhaps, it's not ATC's job to fly the plane. ATC keeps planes separated; pilots fly them. On a clear-and-a-million day, and an 11,000 foot runway, the crew couldn't manage a visual approach. There was more than one error, but I think the NTSB findings on probable cause will overhwelminginly find the failures to be in the forward portion of the aircraft, immediately behind the yokes. (It is hard to fathom.)

rogerbinns 13y ago

Thankfully the NTSB and other accident investigators do not usually come out with a single easy cause in a newsbite size. They will examine lots of contributory factors, and they will come up with suggestions that fix those - typically dozens or more. In aviation they talk of "swiss cheese" theory - slices of cheese with holes in them. The idea is to have many in such a way as holes don't line up. As you say, a failure like this is not "pilot error" but rather a failure of the aviation system and that is what needs to be corrected for all aviation. The "pilot error" is a symptom of the problem, not the cause.