Originally Posted by
artee
..... However... from my (simplistic) viewpoint, the helo pilot explicitly requested visual separation. That's explicitly requesting the right? responsiibilty? to keep themselves separated from other traffic. This they failed to do. Surely that is negligence.
There were other holes in the cheese, so the pilot was working in a compromised environment.
I'm just an SLF, so no domain expertice at all.
Let's say that the reasoning you have described is not only valid but also the dominant theme of an anticipated trial. Is it not difficult to contemplate a trial in which the central theory of liability is invoking a dread phrase, one with both the words "pilot" and "error", or at least the "negligence" version of that phrase. This would be a horrible case to see unfold. Of course the lawyers representing the families and other loved ones of the accident victims will press hard to make exactly such an unfolding happen - and their clients, the families and other loved ones, will be pressing just as hard as the families of the MAX accident victims are doing in the criminal case in federal court in Texas, if not harder.
This is not a reason either to dismiss, or to claim decisivenesss of, any particular legal reasoning here. It is instead recognition that reasoning which points to the request for visual separation and then the failure to maintain it as the basic cause of the accident will produce a very unpleasant legal case. Think of the Army units assigned to this sort of duty, how they are trained to treat "continuity of governement" and transport of highly important (presumably) officials as a kind of higher calling - at least that's the impression given by several statements or articles. And one set of their fellow servicemembers are put in the position of being blamed, and not present even to try to explain what happened. And that's in addition to usual strident reluctance to assign responsibility to aviators in situations where things go wrong.
Over the past several days, it has become clearer that the airspace environment was indeed so compromised that, as SLF/attorney without technical expertise or even knowledge about airspace design, management and operation, it would be best to stop trying to refine an understanding of the causes and effects and instead leave the puzzle-solving aside until the NTSB report is completed and released. That said, the way Sen. Cruz pressed witnesses last week suggests that waiting for the report will be a difficult task.
I appreciate any and every acknowledgement of efforts to make positive contributions to this forum - thank you for your post!
As other posts have admitted I am biased against assigning responsibility in situations such as this one to any aviator. There additionally may be a somewhat unique factor in this case too (involving some personal history about Army aviation maintenance training circa 1975, enlistment as an alternative to dead-end mindless jobs, and studying German in high school and for a couple of semesters in college so that if I ever went to Germany in the Army . . . ).