Originally Posted by BOAC
Not 'limited', PBL
Since you like to contradict me, allow me to contradict you.
Yes, limited.
There is apparently a lot you don't know about accidents and how they are conceived. Let me refer you to, for example, Nancy Leveson's book Safeware, Chapter 9, for a set of concepts, including that of accident, which are pervasive in the safety field. These are derived from a coherent reconstruction of standards in the U.S. Let me also efer you to my book, Causal System Analysis, a draft of which is on-line, Chapter 5, for a discussion of these concepts.
Originally Posted by BOAC
The lack of EMAS 'contributed' to the severity of the accident, not the accident.
This is a contradiction in terms. The definition of an accident includes severity. See Leveson op. cit., or even the U.S. criteria for mandatory reporting of a civil aviation mishap.
If you have Southwest landing in the absolutely identical circumstances and behavior on, say, a 5000 m runway, you don't have anything you could call an accident. You just have a lengthy landing. But to make sense of your statement above, since everything about the event would have been identical except the length of the runway and the severity of the event, you would still have to be calling it an accident. Doesn't make sense, does it?
You are also aware that the NTSB's prioritisation of one cause as "probable" and others as "contributing factors" does not fit the thinking about causality of accidents in its own land, let alone that of other investigating agencies or accident specialists in general. We have been through this before.
PBL