Curtain Twitcher #2872
Thanks for the links; I have read some of the rationale for STAMP, but have difficulty in following the arguments.
Many similar safety initiatives tend to fall foul of hindsight; this is a limitation of this type of thinking - ‘what we could have done for this accident’. Alternatively with beneficial application in foresight, the successful intervention and system design might never be established, because we have not had an accident.
Retrospective safety - focus on accidents for learning, is increasingly limiting in design and operation, thus a forward looking ‘processes’ should improve safety, even if we never know that it has - we never see the accident avoided.
The limit in this approach remains with the human; however good the design and evaluation is, the question ‘have you considered this’ (an aspect of concern*), a human answer ‘yes’ has the rule. Whereas perhaps we need ‘Yyeeees, Probably’, and return to the evaluation - double loop learning, return to the assumptions.
The findings from this accident might identify the problems above (hindsight again), yet we must consider the influences in the existing safety process. Some of the designers and regulators might not have even been born at the time of the initial design and certification. Thus, what has been forgotten, assumption based complacency - does a good accident record bias judgement of the safety of future aircraft variants, whereas treating these as ‘new’ aircraft might question pertinent factors - grandfathers die, let them rest peacefully.
* a machine process designed by humans, subject to our limitations.