Bronx,
sorry if the commentary was long, but I wanted to try to make it clearer where I was coming from.
It is your statement I was discussing, so of course it is free for you to explain what you meant by "negligence", and if you meant "lack of proper care and attention" short of behavior that might be legally significant, then so be it.
But then there should be little need to worry about criminal prosecution, since ipso facto the behavior falls short of that which might be legally significant.
I find it odd that, being one of the relatively few people in Europe who have spoken out in public fora against the criminalisation of complex accidents, I should find myself here being a defender of the view that sometimes pilots may do things which should remain criminally sanctionable.
When we are talking about aviation safety, we are not just talking about those airlines with enviable safety records whose pilots occasionally do something that the rest of us sanction in our hangar flying (such as not checking runway heading before TO). We are also talking about airlines which are banned from flying into any EU country because of their poor record on safety and safety management. The tales of these airlines are all over PPRuNe. And this is the segment of the industry whose even marginal improvement will most affect aviation safety overall, as a glance at accident statistics or a brief talk with an insurance underwriter will show. I am not sure that isolating *any* of their employees from sanction (whether pilots or owners or whomever) is going to help improve safety; indeed, it may be one of the few constraints available to hold more egregious behavior in check. Barrelling down final at VREF+huge is not behavior which requires either subtlety or immunity to discover, and it is questionable whether it falls into any of the Reason categories of error. And if people think that they can do that, and that the worst that will happen to them is that they lose their job (until such time as they find another, flying for an even less conscientious employer), then it is hard to see how they might be motivated to moderate their professional behavior.
The difficulty for me is formulating a position which holds as well for the situation in West Bongoland as it would for the UK or US.
I think worries about the overall effect on aviation safety in North America of confidential data being disclosed during discovery in civil proceedings are legitimate.
On the other hand I know one major case in which, if there was some way of bringing some FOQA data into it, it would turn the course of the discussion about why the accident happened and, in my mind, lead to an overall improvement in aviation safety.
PBL