Originally Posted by
llondel
Probably apocryphal, but there's the tale of the manager at IBM who screwed up and cost the company millions of dollars. He got called in to see the CEO and said "I guess you've called me in to fire me". The response was "Are you kidding? I just spent $30million teaching you a lesson."
What's the chance that either of those pilots, regardless of the reason they got it wrong this time, will make that mistake again?
Far more importantly, and the reason that Old Carthusian is mistaken in his eagerness to can the crew, is that all other pilots can be taught the same lesson of why this incident occurred. A crew who believe that they may be summarily dismissed will do their best to gild the truth in a way that hides any mistakes they may have made and nobody identifies the hole in the cheese. Fine - now that leaves another crew to make the same mistake and this time they
do land on a queue of widebodies - that major accident may not have happened if the first crew had not been under threat of dismissal for that same human misperception.
The only times when dismissal is merited is when it can be shown that an accident/incident was due to intentional mishandling or a gross lack of skill that had a level of history in training or in previous incidents.