LOC-OUT
When you say “the bereaved’ one assumes you’re referring to the family/friends of those upon whom speculators in a public forum might throw blame.
I wonder, and there are two specific Pprune threads in the past few years where I’ve thought to myself “what must those families think if they read this”. One was the AA Airbus rudder accident in New York, the other a Gulf Air A319/320 (?) go-round accident in Dubai.
In the first case the threads contained speculation as to the first officer’s handling abilities and, in particular, to his use of the rudder pedals in countering wake turbulence. In the second, allegations of the pilot’s being inexperienced in type and possibly having been bumped up the ladder prematurely.
In the weeks following the accidents the threads contained a mixture of fact, speculation and the occasional blindly idiotic comment. If the families of the crew involved were accompanying those threads, which I doubt, they would have found some comments offensive.
I really tend to think that they would have heard worse elsewhere. Kids at school, for example. An overheard conversation in an office. I suspect that if anything, reading those threads could well have brought a degree of comfort to the bereaved because they highlighted things outside the immediate control of their loved ones, possibly latent design defects as well as phenomena that relatively few professionals encounter in their working lives – in those two cases severe wake turbulence and somatograhic illusion respectively if I remember correctly.
When we despair at the potential for offense to the bereaved, we have to add to the other side of the scale the sheer wealth ok knowledge and experience threads like those brought together on this easily-accessible-to-any-twelve-year-old public forum. Like school playgrounds, forums are bound to have a leavening of idiots. Not too difficult to identify them, though, is it? On the upside, just think how many people must have read those threads, consigned bits of them to memory and, perhaps, flashed the memory back at precisely the right moment.
