Thanks John, it seems that somethings never change. Is your paper widely available?
What I meant by "accept lower safety standards" was that the bar has been set (rightly or wrongly) and, having failed, excuses as to why accepting a lower standard of evidence is ok may be made. This as opposed to "life's getting harder"
As for pilot response, it strikes me that when things go wrong a la Mull of Kintyre, people become very interested in what went on beforehand - the Boscombe FADEC analysis etc. All this is quite right - IMHO the pilot's can't be accused of negligence because there is insufficient evidence to support this claim. However, all this after the event stuff is because of a tragedy - what is the perception of things before the tragedy (and the support for those trying to argue for a robust safety case), without the benefit of hindsight?
What are we going to say when C-130J/Merlin/JSF/Typhoon/Apache crash because of a software error that can't be traced but the safety case is weak?
Flying is risky, we engineers don't aim to take the fun out of it though.
5206
Last edited by 5206; 29th Mar 2005 at 16:01.