[nolok]

Well when they made that decision every country in the top 10 by air traffic volume had banned the plane except for the USA and Japan (who basically does what the FAA says on such issues), and the FAA and Boeing were still saying it was pilot error and basically blaming the dead people. I don’t see how any self respecting country could have trusted them with the black box in those conditions

[vinay427]

> basically blaming the dead people

This is strange wording to me. There's nothing inherently wrong with blaming "dead people" for something, because many accidents caused by user error result in death of the user. However, in this situation, it certainly seems rather hasty and inappropriate.

[tialaramex]

Well first of all blaming people is the wrong thing for an accident investigation to be doing anyway.

The purpose of accident investigation is not to fuel Americans' apparently insatiable appetite for revenge, you already have plenty of means for that, the purpose is the Prevention of Future Harm. Why Future Harm? Because we don't have time travel.

You clearly won't prevent any future harm by blaming anybody, whether alive or dead. To prevent future harm you will need to change what is done or how.

Almost invariably‡ the Right Thing™ will be some mix of procedural changes and engineering changes. For example ensuring that the right staff are empowered to stop something that's a bad idea being done even if senior management are short-sighted enough to demand it.

So the result is never "Bob is to blame because Bob did X" but rather e.g. "Bob did X. The Foozle should be modified to prevent doing X" or "Bob did X. Company policy did not say that doing X was forbidden. Change policy to forbid X".

‡ I've written about this before on HN. The one investigation report I've seen that did _not_ have any actionable recommendations was into an accident where two people died when their fishing boat sank. The cause? They'd taken so much heroin they couldn't operate the boat safely. Why no recommendation? Using heroin is already illegal. Using any intoxicating substance while in charge of a boat is already illegal. This was already obviously a terrible idea.

[jussij]

There nothing wrong with blaming the "dead people".

The problem is to put out an accident incident report blaming the "dead people" to only then find out the report was 100% wrong.

[ddalex]

blaming dead people may be a misnomer for a common cover-up technique in communist-countries investigations: the dead people are at fault, because then you don't have to punish anybody living, and the dead people are already dead, what you gonna do to them ?