The reality of course is that your chances of being involved in an aircraft accident are incredibly small. Even then the chances of that accident being fatal are significantly smaller. Of course the two places where this is not true are the Democratic Republic of Congo and the Discovery channel!
Where accidents do occur they are very rarely the result of one isolated event. They are usually a result of a whole chain of failures that conspire to cause an event, that any one alternate action might have prevented.
I don't want to make any aditional criticism of the accident in the example you gave, however there were many opportunites for a resolution that for one reason or another simply didn't happen. There are two pilots who check the set up of the instruments and switches prior to every flight. If one misses something, then the back up is that the other pilot will pick up the omission. If that fails then the warning system might alert the crew at some point. If that fails then other resultant events as a consequence, might alert the crew. It is only in the very unusual case of multiple failures to detect and correct, do the markers line up for an incident.
If you will, compare it to an accumulator bet on a horse race. You might win one or two races, but the chances simply become less and less, the more events are required.