To my mind, the two most significant problems with Jim's cheese are:
1. We know almost nothing about the 'slice' which we might label 'good fortune'. Very often, it's the most siginificant slice.
2. Big accidents happen at extraordinarily low levels of probability, when all sorts of weird things have happened. They are often a very poor cue to where and when the next big accident will be, whereas an holistic (and I am being careful not to use that word in a crass sense) approach based on Syd's principles will yield better chances of identifying and eliminating future big accidents. Note that there are exceptions to this, but they're generally very obvious, such as poor alerting systems on certain aircraft types, and operations on poor runway surfaces in demanding environmental conditions.
