From a legal perspective I agree, Not Guilty was an appropriate verdict, but that does not mean he should also escapes taking any responsibility for the accident. Bad choices were by this pilot on the day of this accident and indeed even before that. I am sure he is very regretful for the distress that has resulted from this tragedy and he has already paid a heavy personal price.
You are late for work, as a result you drive too fast breaking the speed limit and overtake in a couple of places where it is unwise to do so, you did the same a week before. You get away with it. On the way home you are no longer in a hurry and so drive perfectly normally. A deer jumps out and you hit it. You are responsible for the accident because of the bad choices you made previously?
We can choose to learn from this tragedy.....or not. It appears two posters in particular see no greater flight safety lesson here, I think they are very wrong.....
If you are suggesting that I am one of those posters you are very wrong in your implication. I have never suggested that or anything of the sort. All I have done is to factually correct some of the speculative assumptions some posters have jumped to, suggesting that somehow the AAIB report was definitive and gospel and therefore the jury must have got it wrong. I have not in any way sought to discuss safety lessons.
BPF I do find it extraordinary that you can provide an "expert" opinion based on your experience as an aerobatic instructor that the pilot was responsible for the accident without having heard the evidence, without having examined the GPS traces, the computer flight dynamics modelling and the flight reconstructions. Justice was clearly failed because the jury did not get to hear your expert opinion but had to rely instead upon amateurs such as the experimental test pilot with 13,000+ hours (experience on 50+ pre and WWII types) who had in fact meticulously carried out all of this analysis. His opnion was that the spin was unrecoverable and a crash inevitable. He was wrong was he?
There are flight safety lessons to be learned from this case. Not with regard to the fatal flight but certainly from previous flights. The pilot had to some extent been let down by the system. He had been misled in some ways by the system and in what he had been shown in the past.
All of the flying experts agreed that the lack of spin training in the PPL syllabus was a mistake. This pilot had in fact elected to take additional spin training and had been lulled into believing it was sufficient. Again the lack of a formal requirement until recently to undertake a formal aerobatics course, may, in the circumstances of this case have misled the pilot. I'm not going to go through what all of those circumstances were as life is too short but they were carefully examined in the evidence and the pilot told the jury in his evidence that knowing what he did now, he would not have carried out some of the previous manoeuvres at the altitudes he did and would have sought additional training.