Originally Posted by
eal401
I was waiting for someone to make this point.
The fact that AH wanted to flying the display and go home is irrelevant. The same applies to the driver who has one drink too many, or drives at 90 on the motorway, or runs a red light.
It just seems from some posts that if you commit a significant error and kill people, so long as you are in a plane "that's OK then"
The only thing that I get from this sad event is that it's now not just the pilot and air show director who require jail time, but those responsible for maintaining the aircraft too. Anyone who disagrees can go and stand in a room with the families of the dead and discuss it with them.
You can't do that {prosecute the pilot} if he didn't wilfully do anything that he knew broke the rules, you really can't - the whole non-fault incident reporting and improvement system sort of depends on it. I mean, in catastrophic incidents it is incredibly rare to have surviving aircrew in any position to prosecute for being fallible, so the gain in successful prosecutions would be tiny, but what would be lost? The next time a Human Factors incident occurs with a live pilot who can describe why they did what they did to investigators, they won't, and perhaps hundreds of people will die in identical crashes that could have been prevented as a result.
Yes, if somebody drives a car & makes a mistake because they misread a bend and kill somebody they go to jail for it, but that's a bug in our current traffic safety system not a feature that air crash investigators need to emulate...