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Old 4th Feb 2010, 06:45
  #2642 (permalink)  
chuks
 
Join Date: Apr 2003
Location: Germany
Age: 76
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Why bother guessing?

Given that the full report should be out soon enough, is there much point to piling up guesses to try and figure out what caused this accident?

Most of us probably would never make jury selection, already having made up our minds about the case before hearing the testimony but that can just be pilots, an opinionated lot in any case. Perhaps that is part of what helps us to go wazzing off through the stratosphere trusting in our wonderful abilities to foresee a happy end to that. In the same way we can be handed a puzzle numerous experts have spent a year trying to solve and just say, "It was because the crew were [insert theory here]," as if that means "case solved." Actually, might it be so that there shall be some stuff in this report we don't know and haven't expected? You know, "expect the unexpected"?

There are all sorts of "tricks of the trade," stuff you learn from flying with other, more experienced pilots or by reading books and articles (as here, even), what we often half-jokingly say is "what you don't learn in flying school." How can one be so sure that someone else, even this crew who died in an accident, had or has "it all wrong"? Often we find it was just one tiny, mistaken detail that was that last, fatal link in an accident chain, the same sort of thing we might also overlook, when the sure way to overlook something is to go around clad in iron self-belief.

If it were just a matter of fixing blame then there would be very little point to publishing accident reports. Of course they don't do that but try to establish causes so that we might want to take a cue from that when posting. Fixing blame is like playing "pin the tail on the donkey," when it's just "game over" once it's pinned. Here we are trying to use this tragedy to keep ourselves in play, just the opposite. There is something in this that goes against human nature, that need to fix blame, so that we really have to work on that.
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