Originally Posted by
Lookleft
The PIC is the final defense but what Ollie is saying is that there can be a series of contributing factors. The airline, the manufacturer and the regulator all want the pilot to be last line of defense because they don't want to take responsibility for the design, operation or regulation that put the crew in the position where an accident resulted. No one is saying that the PIC is never responsible but let me reinforce the point that Ollie made, they are not the SOLE cause. As this discussion is about the MAX you can not find a better example of how the manufacturer and the regulator put the crew into a situation outside what they would normally expect for line operations. To simply say that the crew should have just applied an existing procedure and it would have been fine is deliberately ignoring the fact that the MAX has been grounded while Boeing and the FAA address a problem that should have never been put into production.
I am testing the veracity of the assertion that one has
never seen or produced a report that has Pilot error as the SOLE cause of an accident
The existence of contributory factors (not causes) may or may not mitigate human error. I was not providing specific commentary on the Boeing MCAS case.