WOrkER
My friend, do not seek to strengthen your own argument by twisting my words. What I said was that I thought the pilots might have been negligent, but had not been proven to be so . That is not the same as the implied quote which you ascribe to me.
Your exam questions are pertinent, and you are right to ask them. They are indeed troubling. But neither you nor I can find answers to them in this case. For whatever justifiable reasons, the aircraft had not been fitted with a full accident data recorder. This is hardly the pilots fault, yet the absence of the greater certainty which it might just have provided was held to be sufficient evidence, in the absence of anything influential to the contrary, to damn them to a charge of gross neglect of their duty. That was, at best, disingenuous.
I say again that I accept these pilots might have been negligent, but in their deaths we do not have adequate evidence to deny them the benefit of the doubt which they might have received from a court.
For the record again, I too am frustrated by the wilder hypotheses that all too often appear on this forum. They add nothing positive to the argument and serve to distract one from the essential point, which is the standard of justice applied in this case.