[zarzavat]

Not to justify the murder or anything, but I don’t think that Nielsen can be said to have zero responsibility. He voluntarily worked in such an unsafe environment.

Ultimately if you work in a safety-critical field and you don’t speak up when something is very wrong, then you are just as responsible as anyone else.

Plugging away at your job while maintenance people disconnect the phones from ATC is negligent inaction. Without a working phone line the ATC was clearly offline in a very literal sense and he should have recognized that and either passed the responsibilities to another ATC and/or closed the airspace.

[banannaise]

They boiled the frog on him. They had redundancy - two controllers, two phone lines, two collision warning systems.

They removed one controller. That was... not great, but it seemed okay.

They removed one collision warning system, for a short window. That was... not great, but it seemed okay.

They removed both phone lines. They didn't tell him. That wasn't okay, but he couldn't know that until he needed them.

----

This also disregards that someone is always in the chair. Okay, let's say he quits. Then they're short an additional controller, making the situation worse, and someone else is still sitting in the chair when the exact same thing happens. "He voluntarily worked in an unsafe environment" is just a deflection from the responsibility of the people who have the authority and the opportunity not to make the system unsafe. His only agency was to quit his job or not, which wouldn't have any effect on the outcome.

[yomlica8]

> This also disregards that someone is always in the chair. Okay, let's say he quits. Then they're short an additional controller, making the situation worse, and someone else is still sitting in the chair when the exact same thing happens. "He voluntarily worked in an unsafe environment" is just a deflection from the responsibility of the people who have the authority and the opportunity not to make the system unsafe.

I can sort of see different ways to look at these situations but I usually don't see them that way. While desperately holding together a broken system seems heroic, it assumes that help is on the way. Many times no help is on the way because the system is sort of barely functioning so there is no priority to improve it. If he left maybe the other controllers would all leave as well, ending the farce.

> His only agency was to quit his job or not, which wouldn't have any effect on the outcome.

He probably wouldn't have been murdered and blamed for the the outcome!

[truculent]

I agree with you, but it sounds like the maintenance causing systems offline happened relatively quickly with no prior communication. In which case Nielsen was stuck trying to manage the two urgent situations that had arisen at the same time.