Lonewolf, re "were they set up to fail?" # 1582
In that sense, they (us, the industry), were ‘set up’ to fail. However, ‘set up’ could imply forethought / previous knowledge, which might be, or its absence might be, a major contributor to the accident.
With hindsight, many posts question “why did/didn’t they” … etc, etc; whereas if the industry had foreseen these issues then the accident might have been avoided, e.g. a complex interaction of system design and human reaction, changing economic climate, social changes in operations and training, expectation, peer pressure.
Alternatively, where the industry considers issues, human judgement could still decide not to act – the risk is acceptable, e.g. multiple pitot icing resulting in LOC. Much of this is driven but public expectation; - and we are a very safe industry, but beware the seeds of complacency.
The above reflects normal human behaviour; humans are irrational. We don’t foresee every eventuality, systems cannot be tested rigorously, particularly where there is human interaction, and where problems are identified safety vs practicality are often judged to balance.
In this sense, AF 447 may have been an accident too far. Yet there have been other, similar situations where the humans rescued the situation (DC-10 Sioux City, A300 Baghdad). The human behaviour in all of these was identical – the humans did their best in the circumstances – as they saw the situation; only with hindsight is an event judged, and on occasion, ‘best’ is not good enough.
I prefer to avoid hindsight, instead look to see how and why human performance varies, and hope to establish what might be done to improve human performance or change the nature of circumstances to be faced (technical / social); but this probably requires some forethought, which is where the ‘seeds of failure’ might be found.