[_-___________-_]

I'm not claiming that anything absolves Boeing, and I can't see how any of my words can be interpreted in that way. I encourage you to read what I'm actually writing rather than imagine what I'm thinking.

There are serious issues to be resolved by Boeing and the FAA. There are issues to be resolved around airline company culture. There are issues to be resolved around pilot training and other human factors.

This "entirely Boeing's fault" stuff just encourages a blinkered view of the situation and is exactly the absolutism I was referring to in my grandparent post.

This absolutism is encouraged by the media (just look at that BBC headline: "Battle over blame") and is thankfully absent from the actual investigative work.

While I have no idea why hot air from a congressman is relevant here, the first quote from Graves is accurate. Pilot error was identified as a factor in the preliminary report, and every subsequent report has also identified it as a factor. Obviously there are far more important factors, but it's still a factor, and every factor should be considered and possibly acted upon. As I mentioned in a grandparent comment, the multi-factor approach to accident investigation is one of the reasons air travel is so safe today.

The second quote is pretty much impossible for him to back up and should probably be treated as the usual political noise -- he is, after all, a congressman.

[DrScientist]

I said:

> Sure there are other factors - it's a question of how many times do you have to roll the dice before you get a crash - clearly far too few in this planes case - and that is entirely Boeing's fault.

You said:

>This "entirely Boeing's fault" stuff just encourages a blinkered view of the situation and is exactly the absolutism

You haven't understood what I wrote.

Let's say there is a dice - that represents the chances of a combination of different factors occurring ( weather, pilot experience, plane maintenance, chance of debris hitting sensor, cosmic ray hitting computer - whatever )

What numbers that dice rolls is entirely out of Boeing's control.

However what is entirely in it's control is what happens when particular combinations, represented by the numbers, come up.

So if there is a plane that crashes only when you roll a six, and a plane that crashes when you roll a five or a six, clearly the second plane is 100% worse and yes the individual crash depends on what the dice rolled - but the relative safety of the plane doesn't!!!

Do you understand now?