Originally Posted by
kkong
I am not sure why some posters believe that pilots should be exempt from an investigation into possible criminal negligence?
If the pilot(s) are not found to be criminally negligent (based on CVFDR analysis by the CAA), no charges will be brought and no information from the CVFDR will be disclosed.
That is made clear in the judgement.
No-one is saying the pilots should be exempt from prosecution for criminal negligence. What we (I) are saying is that the AAIB are the experts, let's allow them to produce a properly considered report before contemplating prosecution. The AAIB already have a 2 year start, so to imagine that the CAA, who are not particularly good at interpreting flight data in the context of an accident, will be able to whizz through the data in a short period of time and then come up a valid opinion before the AAIB report, is ludicrous.
There were no technical factors in this accident as far as we know, that means the aircaft did what you would expect it to do given the control inputs etc. From that it is easy to deduce that it was "pilot error" which, at the simplest level, it probably was. However deciding it was "pilot error" and then hanging the pilots achieves nothing other than vengeance and retribution. The real question is why did the pilots do or fail to do what they did? If it was because they were texting their mates, reading the paper etc then fair enough they were negligent, but I think it's highly unlikely that they were doing anything other than their best. So the question is, why was their best not good enough and within that question lies a raft of issues around training, SOPs, legislation, company culture, national culture, commercial issues, human factors aircraft MMI and a host of other things.
To rush into it like the bull in the china shop achieves nothing except popularism and short term political expediency.