>So, even in a major event where all lives aboard were lost, investigating the whole problem and finding opportunities for improvements will make aviation safer, simply saying "the pilot screwed it" won't get anything done.
Yes, it does. Many aviation crashes are attributed to "pilot error". There's only so much you can do with procedures and such; at some point, the pilot has to be held accountable for screwing up, and investigations do exactly that many times.
Usually, in major events, you're looking at commercial airliners with a pilot and co-pilot and in those cases, it's usually something much worse than a mistake by the pilot, and frequently several bad things happening at once. But in general aviation, where you have one pilot, frequently non-commercial, flying a small aircraft, the cause is frequently just "pilot error". A common example of this is the pilot running out of fuel because they did their calculations wrong. It happens frequently with private pilots, and in a Cessna you can't just pull over when you run out of gas.
I'd argue even that even in cases of "clear cut" pilot error, the goal is to learn and prevent it.
For example, the first fatal 747 crash, the Lufthansa coming down upon departure from Nairobi, happened almost certainly because the flight crew did not extend the leading edge flaps. Clear case of pilot error. If that response had been it, it would have happened again (in fact, it did happen at least twice before, but at lower altitude airports where the aircraft performance was enough for the crew to depart without accident).
Instead, it was acknowledged that the whole system could be improved, and Boeing put in a take-off configuration warning.
Similarly, AF 347 over the Atlantic - sure, you can argue that the pilot in the right seat should not have pushed the stick forward, and that it was entirely his fault, case closed. But maybe one can, instead, improve the whole system, the HCI, etc.
You're talking about big commercial planes. Yes, you can alter procedures here and attempt to prevent the same thing from happening again.
Not in general aviation. You're not going to get all the Cessna 172 owners to modify some part of their plane to make it better and avoid some incident where some yahoo private pilot did something dumb and crashed. It's hard enough just getting privately-owned aircraft to be properly serviced. Many of them are many decades old and quite primitive. You're not going to improve "the whole system", the HCI, etc. in some airplane made in 1940 or whenever.
Finally, attributing an incident to "pilot error" doesn't automatically mean that there weren't contributing factors or that things couldn't be done better.
You are probably right, but I am privately a bit concerned regarding the crashed Air France Flight 447, and the conclusions made regarding pilot error.
I can't shake the suspicion that the Airbus man-machine interface and programming is partly to blame - possibly only when pushed into an extreme configuration, and certainly just as a topping on other factors.
It's clear however, that it's politically and economically impossible to ground all machines made by the European union's prestige project, Airbus.
Fully agreed - shifting all the blame on the pilot absolves Airbus too easily.
Remember the AirAsia from Surabaya, where they got themselves into an upset because of a tiny crack in the rudder-travel limiter unit ("topping on other factors"), then apparently made basically the same mistake as AF 447, one pilot pulling full back all the way down.
Yes, it does. Many aviation crashes are attributed to "pilot error". There's only so much you can do with procedures and such; at some point, the pilot has to be held accountable for screwing up, and investigations do exactly that many times.
Usually, in major events, you're looking at commercial airliners with a pilot and co-pilot and in those cases, it's usually something much worse than a mistake by the pilot, and frequently several bad things happening at once. But in general aviation, where you have one pilot, frequently non-commercial, flying a small aircraft, the cause is frequently just "pilot error". A common example of this is the pilot running out of fuel because they did their calculations wrong. It happens frequently with private pilots, and in a Cessna you can't just pull over when you run out of gas.