If that square had been contaminated and was unusable due to a fuel or oil spill that the arriving pilot didn't know about and the aircraft had been positioned in the same way - but for a clearly good reason - then would you still blame 50% on the positioning crew?
Yes, I would. You either put an aircraft on a pad or you don't. Never put it next to one with too little clearance and then start up. Especially if you know that one a/c is still out there yet to return to base. That is just sheer negligence. If one hasn't been usable, use the other one and make sure the one not usable is marked in a way and let arriving aircraft know via radio. Place someone on the ground watching out, marshalling the arriving aircraft.
The Flight Safety poster - ASSUME makes an ASS out of U and Me - seems appropriate.
I'm with you; both the arriving pilot as well as the guys on the ground made a lot of unsafe assumptions that display a drastic lack of safety culture.
From the report:
The pilot stated that he placed the helicopter on the outside of Pad 1; he knew they would be off the ground in a couple of minutes or he would be up on radios. The pilot stated that his thought process was that, when he was up on radios he would check the weather, and request the pilot of N911FA start toward the priority call.
That sort of complacency directly led to this accident. Yes, physically one airframe was moving and the other was not. Regardless of the verbatim definition of a root cause, for me there is clearly two main reasons for this accident to have happened. The pilot on the ground was obviously aware of the lack of physical clearance.
Everyone involved in aviation has to make sure to contribute a hole-free slice of swiss cheese. The goal must always be not to let complacency, assumptions, operational urgency or any other reasons get in the way of a safety based thought process.
Also I would give a good chunk of blame to the operation as apparently there were no clear procedures established and the design of the pad was questionable at best.