"Andrew Sarangan" wrote in message
oups.com...
I think you are taking the phrase "angry" to an extreme. It is not that
I am sitting here pounding my fist on the table and crying for revenge.
I am angry that the pilots were so careless and took so many innocent
lives with them.

Equivocate all you want...your post expresses more than just a general
feeling of angry resentment, and the use of term "gross negligence" goes way
beyond anything anyone has learned yet.

[...] When 50 people die, I call it gross negligence.

Then you are ignorant of the correct use of the term.

I am not a lawyer, so may be there is a deeper meaning to
"gross" than what I am aware of.

"Gross negligence" has a very specific meaning. If you use it for other
than that meaning, you are in error. Here is one example of the dictionary
definiton for "gross negligence" (from Webster's):

an extremely careless action or an omission that is willful
or reckless disregard for the consequences to the safety or
property of another; also called very great negligence,
culpa lata

If that is not what you mean, then you should not be using the term.

Yes, most aircraft accidents are due to human error. Aircraft is a
machine built by humans. When it fails how could it not be human error?

Lots of mechanical failures are due simply to normal wear. And there's a
wide variety of normal wear that is either simply impossible to detect
during any normal inspection of the airplane, or which occurs after a proper
inspection was done and was not detectable at that inspection.

It is just as ignorant to claim that ALL mechanical failures are due to
human error as it is to claim that there is enough information in this
accident to judge the pilots grossly negligent.

The difference is, some errors are simple and clear and be traced to
one or two individuals, while other errors are more complex,
intertwined and involves many thousands of people. We often equate the
former as human error and the latter as policy failures. But
ultimately humans are responsbile for all our errors.

But not all accidents are caused by human error.

Perhaps I am being naiive, but I have experienced fatigue due to lack
of sleep and long flights in IMC. When that happens, I make a
deliberate attempt to check, double check and triple check everything.
When I know I am vulnerable, I take the obvious steps to prevent a
mishap.

You have no reason to claim that these pilots did not do exactly that. Even
as a person may recognize their reduced performance and may take steps to
attempt to mitigate that reduced performance, fatigue may prevent them from
recognizing that the steps they have taken did not prevent a mistake.

Beyond that, you seem to *really* be too focused on the individual
possibilities. The very fact that you see a need to argue against each
hypothetical is proof positive that you are jumping to conclusions. If you
had enough information to fairly judge the pilots, you could explain to all
of us exactly what happened.

You don't have that information, so you're left trying to fight off each
possible explanation one at a time. Even if you successfully argue against
a possibility (and you haven't so far), the fact remains that you have NO
IDEA what happened, and are not in a position to fairly judge whether the
pilots acted in a grossly negligent (or even plainly negligent) manner.

The most you can say is that they made a mistake. You have no idea why they
made that mistake, and you cannot even claim that you would not have made
the exact same mistake in the exact same situation.

[...]
Perhaps you should avoid flying when it's dark then. You don't seem to
have
the proper respect for the reality of the situation.

That is a pretty cheap shot.

Why? You're the one saying that it's not harder to see when it's dark. I
think most of us recognize the reality that it's harder to see when it's
dark. Your claim is exactly opposite from how most of us understand
darkness. I simply pointed that out.

Night flying is harsher than day, but not
because you can't see the end of the runway.

No one (except perhaps you) is saying that seeing the end of the runway
would have prevented this accident. So what's your point?

Certain things are easier
to see at night than day, and runway lights is one of them, especially
when you are lined with it.

So the pilots saw the runway lights? How would that have helped them avoid
the accident? Are you claiming that they DID see the runway lights, and
that the runway lights DID provide unmistakable evidence that they were on
the wrong runway, and that they DID ignore that unmistakable evidence? And
if you aren't saying that, then why do you bring up the question of seeing
the runway lights?

Other things are harder to see at night,
like clouds, emergency landing sites and small print on charts. But
those are not what we are talking about here.

What we're talking about here is the fact that when it's dark, it's harder
to see things, especially those things that would have made it easier for
the pilots to recognize that they were in the wrong place.

Pete