Good Captaincy decisions start with resisting organizational pressure to operate beyond acceptable risk
True in a perfect world
Ti, but when normalisation of deviance is the SOP, and it's the company ethos, else you are subject to the highlighted part of the NTSB report below.
Survival Flight’s inconsistent compliance with standard operating procedures and regulations, combined with management’s procedural gaps in risk management, advertising of flights in lower weather minimums, pressure to complete flights, and punitive repercussions for safety decisions, were indicative of a poor safety culture at the company.
Probable Cause
The NTSB determines that the probable cause of this accident was Survival Flight’s inadequate management of safety, which normalized pilots’ and operations control specialists’ noncompliance with risk analysis procedures and resulted in the initiation of the flight without a comprehensive preflight weather evaluation, leading to the pilot’s inadvertent encounter with instrument meteorological conditions, failure to maintain altitude, and subsequent collision with terrain. Contributing to the accident was the Federal Aviation Administration’s inadequate oversight of the operator’s risk management program and failure to require Title 14 Code of Federal Regulations Part 135 operators to establish safety management system programs.
Even the FAA gets a slap. Remember the two Shuttles were br ought down by normalisation of deviance, so it's not confined to the low end of GA. It's very rare that an accident is the result of a single cause, like the pilot not standing up to organisational pressure, the NTSB has told us why the pilot in this case possibly didn't - punitive repercussions.