Yes, I'm quite experienced as well - but I'd prefer to do my best to make arguments that stand up on their own, regardless of who makes them.
Anyhow, this "Pilot Error" chestnut. The allocation of blame is deeply satisfying to the human ego (so long as it's not you being blamed), but it doesn't actually help much and can actually be quite misleading. In order to understand this, it's important to realise that (beyond a few middle-eastern idiots who seem to have it in for all forms of public transport) absolutely nobody sets out to cause an aircraft accident. No maintainer wants an aircraft they've looked after to suffer from an accident, no pilot wants an aircraft they are flying to suffer even the most minor of accident, no aircraft company wants anything more than a zero accident rate in the aeroplanes that they design, build and sell.
The problem is that aviation is incredibly complex - the design, build, maintenance and operation of a flying machine is so complex that nobody can understand fully all of the issues associated with any of those topics. We can only hope, any of us, to know enough - and be professional enough in our approach - to keep our particular neck of aviation safe.
And sometimes we fail, particularly because we all have finite time and resources to do what we're doing. I can think of several occasions where I had to examine an aeroplane which had suffered an incident or accident, and as a result imposed restrictions on that aircraft which had people demanding my head on a silver platter - because it was considered that the safety standards I was demanding was excessive. On the other hand I overran a runway once because of some less than sparkling judgment on my part, doing a lot of expensive damage and again having other people criticising me - for not applying sufficient care and attention.
What is significant here is that I, the person at the sharp end, had to make a decision - of how to achieve what SHOULD HAVE BEEN sufficient safety for APPROPRIATE resources. On at-least one occasion, I got it wrong! On other occasions absolutely nobody can prove whether I was right or wrong, only that there was no accident - but did I go over the top?
I'm rambling now, so let's get this back to bulletpoints:
- Nobody plans to cause an accident
- Nobody is as knowledgeable as they'd like to be
- Nobody has all the resources they'd like to be as safe as they'd like to be
- Aviation still has to happen
- Therefore, sometimes a wrong judgement is made, and either we impose excessive costs on ourselves or don't fly when we could have (bad), or we have an accident (very very bad).
- What we must then do is learn from that, and keep going - with the emphasis on no accidents, maximum flying, and minimum cost.
- We'll never get that absolutely right! When we don't, calling it "error" and allocating blame just gets in the way of stopping us getting it wrong a second time.
G