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by mrandish 338 days ago
Others already said it but since I'm the person you responded to, I'll reiterate that my suggestion was only about reordering the sequence of that sentence for better clarity, not about placing blame on individuals over process. When a failure can cause serious consequences including killing people, proper system design should never even permit a single point of failure to exist, especially one relying on humans to always perform correctly and completely. Even well-trained, highly-conscientious humans can make a mistake. While these people should have received better training as well as comprehensive sequential checklists, a good system design will have critical failure points such as this each verified and signed off by a separate inspector.

The problem with a culture which prioritizes "blame is due where blame is due" is it can cause people to not report near-misses and other gaps as well as cover-up actual mistakes. The shift in the U.S. from blaming (and penalizing) occasional pilot lapses to a more 'blameless' default mode was controversial but has now clearly demonstrated that it nets better overall safety.