A Crime Against Safety

This article examines the increasing propensity to criminalize airline personnel involved in airline accidents rather than see human error as a symptom of failure that is connected to tools, tasks and operating environment. Since 1960 the accident rate of jet airliners has improved from 60 per million departures to 0.73. The author describes the “old view,” which blames human error as the cause of most accidents, and believes crashes can only be prevented by punishing unreliable humans, as well as the “new view,” which argues that human error is only a symptom of failure connected to the tasks of operating an airliner. The author includes the views of human factors experts, the FAA Administrator Marion Blakey, and a member of the Commercial Aviation Safety Team who all believe the “blame game” that is played when an accident occurs only hinders investigations into why the accident occurred and how to prevent future ones. The author describes a number of recent incidents to illustrate this point.