safetypee. You are absolutely correct that the legal process to assign blame and/or impose punishment or set compensation is backwards-looking. Juries (or judges) reach binary verdicts (guilty or not guilty) or assign shares of culpability and hence compensatory and/or punitive damages in a process that requires judgement in hindsight. It's also true that it may be easier to conclude negligence when a babysitter allows an infant to drown in a bathtub because he/she didn't notice the plug was in than when three supposedly skilled, highly-trained, and expensively compensated professional pilots fail to recognize a stall for several minutes in perfectly flyable aircraft thus causing the deaths of several hundred people. I was only pressing the point that culpability in the cockpit (or the training school, or even the regulatory agencies) shouldn't be set aside because it might make lesson-learning more difficult. best regards.