[AdamN]

There was an IBM article a while back advocating for '5 Hows' as a replacement for '5 Whys' with this logic. How was it possible for this to happen and that should be the root question that drives improvements. Pilot error should effectively be a non-option for root cause.

Also important is that there is no single root cause for any event. Therefore there is no single 'error' that could be attributed to any one root anyway (in particular the pilot).

[marcosdumay]

Just to point out, but aviation accident investigations do not use '5 Whys' or any dumbed-down framework like that.

They go and list everything that went wrong, without even a lot of concern for causality. They also list all reasonable points of improvement, regardless if they were important for this one incident or not.

Human error is always there, of course. But the idea that they are blaming this on the human is wrong. They are not blaming anything on anything.