Prosecuting pilots and sending them to jail for negligence does NOTHING to improve aviation safety.
The pilot doesn't realise at the time he's being negligent so he sure aint thinking at that time about whether he's gonna go to jail, so it aint a deterrent to being negligent. Pilots fly safe because they dont want to crash, not because they're afraid of going to jail.
Prosecuting pilots and sending them to jail for negligence does HARM to aviation safety.
If there's an incident/crash, it's in the interests of flight safety to find out exactly what happened and why, if any mistakes were made and why, and then for the pilots concerned and other pilots to learn from it. That only works if the people concerned give the accident investigators a full account of everything that happened. Everything, including things they think looking back on it they did wrong and things other people might decide were wrong.
People aint gonna speak freely about mistakes they made if they're afraid they could end up going to jail. One because self-preservation is human nature and two because in most parts of the world a suspect in a police investigation has the right to remain silent.
IMHO you can have an accident investigation in which people can cooperate fully with the investigators without the risk of being prosecuted so that they and others can learn from any mistakes made OR a criminal investigation in which they can say nothing and so the chances are nothing will be learnt from it.
What you can't have is things pilots say when helping the accident investigators later being used to prosecute them. If that was allowed, the pilots would have to be warned that might happen and make their own minds up whether to cooperate with the investigators so others can learn from it or use their right to remain silent.
IMHO it's in the interests of flight safety we learn from our own mistakes and other guys mistakes. The best chance of achieving that is if the guys who know the true facts can speak freely without a noose hanging over their heads.
Comparisons with driving don't wash. There's no equivalent procdure for publishing the results of accidents on the highway so that other drivers can read the full details of exactly what happened and learn from it, and there's nothing new to be learnt from 99.999% of highway accidents.
B.
Last edited by Bronx; 10th Feb 2008 at 09:40.