@ FEHERTO:
Sorry, have been away for a few days.
I have not made it political, but if that is how you want to see it, fine. You're not the only one to have lost family members to a terrible regime applying "laws" that were barbaric, nor, I'm afraid, will you be the last one. But you'd be surprised how little of the real devestating effects is known outside continental Europe, which is where many of the respondents reside.
If every Austrian is offended by my reference to a time and era that has cost them dearly, they can say so. Knowing some of them I do not accept your claim.
Good on you for being an accident investigator. I am not inexperienced myself. And I do know that there is a fine line between following guidance in the interest of safety, and taking decisions that contravene or seemingly contravene, or may be perceived to contravene such guidance in the interest of safety.
While the controller certainly misread the FAA's leeway for non-standard delegation of voicing a clearance, I'm sure he took every precaution to ensure that safety was never compromised.
After the fallout of this one, I'm also sure that there will be no reoccurrance, and the kneejerk restrictions that will become reality to save face will even further take away anything that used to make this a satisfying as well as a challenging industry.
But in every job where you need people strong enough to make difficult decisions based on their experience and gut feeling, as well as their knowledge of the rules and systems they work with, you will need strong characters to perform them. And with that (it has been mentioned earlier) comes a modicum of arrogance, because one needs the confidence to take positive charge under difficult circumstances.
What is called "safety" nowadays has nothing to do with protecting the innocent and everything with protecting the (reputations of) companies, managers etc. Just read the thread about hi-vis jackets. In that sense, the controller should have known better, but somehow he and his supervisor did not.
I'm sure that I have been more of a distraction by talking unexpectedly at inopportune moments during numerous visits to ATC in the places where I worked than a supervised 9yearold with clear instructions what to do and what not to do, and a dad ready to intervene if and when necessary.
So if you still feel offended by my mentioning of the most perverse extrapolation of the "law is law" line of thinking, drop me a PM and we can compare numbers of relatives butchered by totalitarian regimes.
But I do hope that you will be able to see that between the black and white there is a large grey area where we all have to operate now and again, and where always following the rules (just read a nice chapter in "the naked pilot" about Comet take off crashes caused by the pilots concerned doing everything by the book, the book just did not cater for reality) may get you killed rather than keep you safe.
We all want to operate safely, but of we can combine safety with a smile on outr faces, why not?