The video of the final approach should be in every training school to tell captains & F/O's 'what NOT TO DO.'

Remember the accident in India, B737, where the F/O was questioning the captain in a very unassertive manner and they landed fast, went off the end, over a cliff, crashed & burned.
Same accident, luckily different result. Information can stop this happening again???No it can't, because at Thesilonika someone did it again since. What ever happened to self-preservation?

What about a truck driver going through town way too fast and because of that crashing into a school bus killing 25 children?

Should he not be put to trial because it was an "accident"? Should he get a slap on his hand and then be given a new truck?

There are so many differences between the trucking industry and the airline industry. Comparing the two is disingenuous at best. There is a reason why the airline industry -- even in Indonesia -- is much safer than alternate forms of transportation.

To foster safety, in most jurisdictions an aircraft accident is investigated by a Transportation Safety Board -- not by the police. Part of the reason is to encourage free flow of information.

A pilot should be free to talk to the Safety Board about the accident so lessons can be learned and improvements to safety can be made.

Otherwise, all pilots must completely "lawyer up" after every accident, since anything a pilot says can and will be used against him in a criminal court. The pilot cannot trust that the investigator will not try to trap him into making criminally incriminating statements.

Hence it is for the good of society that pilots are shielded from criminal liability when they make mistakes. We trade-off jailing some pilots for the safe travel of millions of passengers each year. Which would you rather have?

This does not mean that pilots are completely "immune" to criminal liability. But the standard for charging must be very high -- beyond simple or even gross negligence. E.g., if a pilot was high on drugs and caused a fatal accident, then that pilot should be convicted in criminal court.

It is a difficult one; considering what is happening in other life threatening industries e.g. health. I wonder if the quote from the captain, when confronted by the police, "we did everything by the book," could really let him off from a compounded negligence charge once the evidence was out. A mistake is a mistake; an accident an accident; but if the program is true and he ignored >15 warnings that it was all going to end in tears AND the call from the F/O to escape from this descending spiral, one has to consider just how far you can take this 'blameless, it was an accident' idea. It suggested that the F/O had warned about the 320kts speed in descent. Was this guy using VNAV for guidance? If so there would have been further clues, ignored, long before. It seemed a little late to dive for the glide. Could fixation really be the mitigating circumstance? Total sensory overload? This was not a 'taken by surprise; it jumped out and bit me' type accident. If it was overload, cumulative, should someone remain a captain?

This is an interesting accumulation of circumstances considering the thread about newbies and modern technology. Both pilots had sufficient experience and the captain must be slightly old-tech school.

Having said that; as a trainer the program didn't tell how the accident happened. It told me why the a/c went off the end. That was the final curtain. The show must have begun before TOD and continued during the descent, but why? I always like to look for the root cause of an error so I can help find a good solution in prevention and open some eyes into proactive planning. Does anyone know anything extra?

And, what happens in coach/bus/train/ship crashes? I have the idea that their investigations, including human factors, are not yet at aviation level.

"Hence it is for the good of society that pilots are shielded from criminal liability when they make mistakes."

I find it hard to call this a "mistake". That implies that it was just a small handling error that no one should be blamed for and is something we have to accept.

No that's not what it means.

There are already plenty of other avenues for action, aside from the criminal justice system:

• The airline can take disciplinary action, including termination
• The regulator or an administrative court can take enforcement actions, including revocation of licenses / certificates
• The victims/families can seek damages (including punitive damages) from the pilot, airline, etc., in civil court