Five months in jail (and PTSD) - pilot found criminally negligent fornot following a preflight checklist

Don argues against sending anyone to prison for the appalling outcome of a careless omission. In the UK, in the law relating to driving, we have offences of careless driving and of dangerous driving. Dangerous driving is much worse than careless driving. Until recently, after a fatal car accident, you used only to be sent to prison if you were guilty of dangerous driving. The tabloid newspapers used to screan when 'drivers who killed people' did not get sent to prison. Recently, the offence of causing death by careless driving was introduced with a maximum prison sentence of 5 years. It seems to make the tabloids happy. Personally, I agree with Don - we are all sometimes guilty of carelessness, we nearly always get away with it, I don't think you should be sent to prison if someone dies only because of the disastrous consequences of the same level of carelessness.



On Sunday, 16 February 2014 01:56:40 UTC, Don Johnstone wrote:
This posting raises a very interesting question, nothing to do with

aviation but everything to do with what we do about a person who makes a

mistake, who knows what he should do, which he has every intention of

doing, which he has done many times before without error but which he fails

to do on one occasion resulting in tragedy.



What is to be gained by punishing him by putting him in prison? What useful

purpose does it serve?



Did it reduce the chance of him doing the same thing again? No of course it

did not, the result of his failure saw to that.

Did it encourage others to take more care? It might except in this case

there appears to be no intention of being careless, people do who make

mistakes in general have no intention of making mistakes, the opposite in

fact.

The only possible explanation for the sentence is revenge which achieves

nothing. What this sort of action does do is discourage people from

reporting honest mistakes. There are other factors that also disincetivise,

peer ridicule being one of the major ones.



The action by the court in BC has done absolutely nothing to prevent a

similar action in the future. If in this case, the error had been

discovered prior to the point at which the result was fatal, during the

takeoff run for instance, the chances are this would never have seen a

court at all.



The 5 months was solely the result of the outcome and served no useful

purpose at all. Punishment is appropriate perhaps for deliberate acts but

never ever for errors, however tragic.



During the two world wars many soldiers were shot for desertion, punished

for running away. We now know that many of these unfortunates were sick and

had no control over what they did, seems we never learn, sometimes I wonder

if we want to.

For me the real criminals in this case are the judge and prosecutors.

On reflection, the thing that sticks with me about this incident is what came out at the trial as an explanation. The pilot was distracted by his new video camera.

I guess that whenever something new is introduced into the cockpit, we are more likely to forget some routine but essential preflight steps.

This is probably the most important lesson.
Skipping a checklist most likely wouldn't cause you to forget something. Distraction will. Even if you always use checklist, distraction will cause you to miss an item in your checklist. Distraction is your enemy.

Ramy