A couple of posters have commented on the pilot's apparent inability to see the thing he ran into.
While I agree it may appear surprising that something as large and mobile as a Ferris wheel wasn't visible to him I recently read another Court decision
here that I think has relevance.
In this case a pilot landed on a runway that contained two large orange cherry-pickers, and struck one of them. Two pilots gave evidence that they simply did not see the cherry pickers even though they were probably closer to them on landing than the Ferris wheel would have been to Mr Cox. These two pilots had 19,000-odd and 25,000-odd hours, they were clearly very experienced.
While there were different circumstances one could expand upon the common point to me was that, generally, from the base leg these three pilots were very much concentrating on where they were going to land to the exclusion almost of all else in the periphery.
From the comfort of the flight-desk it's easy to be critical of this, but with the evidence at hand, and particularly for Mr Cox, I'm not sure I'd call it 'negligence' in the normal dictionary sense (albeit it may be so in law).
Why is this? Well Mr Cox was a low-hour pilot (80-something IIRC), he was clearly cautious and probably nervous, and given the conditions would have been looking even harder at the runway surface than perhaps he might normally. On his first attempt at a full stop he made a mess of it (haven't we all at some stage?) and in his recovery drifted off-line striking the wheel he never saw.
The evidence in the NZHC document supports a view that his inability to see the Ferris wheel was likely quite genuine - and possibly not entirely unusual. To me this suggests that the outcome of the Cox accident may
not be a simple result of failure to exercise care and attention, rather it was a mistake - and one from which the dramatic consequences may have been more easily and effectively avoided by those on the ground than the one in the air...