While the final report is not out yet and so my mind might change, as events stand now I think that in 20 years AF447 is going to be studied as a classic case of system failure. Everyone shares part of the plane from the pilots to the airline to the the manufacturer and its subcontractors. Regrettably, no one really cares about that at this stage; all they want to do is point fingers and shift blame so that when all is said and done it is not they by some other sap who bears the financial cost of this disaster. While the final report is not out yet and so my mind might change, as events stand now I think that in 20 years AF447 is going to be studied as a classic case of system failure. Everyone shares part of the plane from the pilots to the airline to the the manufacturer and its subcontractors. Regrettably, no one really cares about that at this stage; all they want to do is point fingers and shift blame so that when all is said and done it is not they by some other sap who bears the financial cost of this disaster.
This is a surface perception gleened by reading too many discussion posts by people not in the actual chain
You can call it what you will ... even gravestone mentality .. citing a few fatal accidents over the years.
Engineering is not an exact science. Trades are made and lessons learned. But more importantly measuments are applied to avoid worsening our lives and to ensure that we are taking more steps forward than backward.
The confusion about who to blame for the accident du jour is in your mind. It has nothing to do with the learning process and the search for corrective actions that ensure more steps forward than backward. The regulators, the designers, the operators will look to the engineers to effect this process.
So ignore the rhetoric in discussion boards and blogs and look for immediate results in Service buletins, FCOMs, Training, product upgrades and maybe in 10 years a regulatory change.
The fact that you might not recognize the progress has a lot to do whether you are part of the process or not.