So, if someone who lost everything at Enron (for $hits and giggles let's say it all happened yesterday), caused a car accident today that killed a few people, can you say it's Enron's fault since you were distraught about your job??? Just wondering.

 

I didn't say it wasn't the pilots fault. I was bringing up some contributing factors to why it was their fault. My point was looking at the bigger picture which some people obviously can't do.

 

ERJ Driver, you read exactly what I meant with my original post. Herc, I didn't mean that the flight crew was victims, nor did I write it. What I said was with all the factors involved in this crash, the flight crew were _becoming_ victims of circumstance. Meaning that yes, it was their mistake. However, it's a mistake I think any of us could have made under similar circumstances, and in fact several others have made this mistake. Fortunately for those crews, the runway was either long enough, the tower caught the mistake, or some other link in the chain was somehow broken.

All I'm getting at is that what we need to do is look at WHY the crew made the mistakes they made. Just because the ultimate cause of the crash was a crew mistake doesn't mean the problem died with the crash. That's all I meant.

 

Couple quick points to throw my two cents in:
1) fatigue - crew was scheduled for plenty of rest. Whether they got it or not, who knows? And who's responsibility is it to make sure they do? As for the controller, NTSB said in the hearing that the controller said it was not his normal practice to watch an aircraft actually take off - therefore, they had a hard time saying it was "fatigue" that prevented him from watching, since according to him, he would not have watched them takeoff anyway.

2) NTSB said in the hearing that the second controller would have very likely not been in the tower cab. That is why they were reluctant to say a second controller would have made a difference. They went back and looked at how the controllers were working together on the nights they did have two, and most times only one was actually in the cab anyway.

3) Crew did not seem rushed. Actually sat in the runup area for 40 seconds finishing up the checklists before taking runway 26 (in error).

4) Bottom line, NTSB felt like although lots of the pieces of the system were broken (bad charts, missing NOTAMs, controller not watching, ultimately crew should have had enough information (signage on runways/taxiways and cues in the flight deck) to identify the correct runway. But that does not mean that there were not a lot of system failures that occured, anyone of which may have made the difference. The holes in the chees just lined up this time.

I agree that anyone of us could make the same mistakes with the same outcome on a bad day. God rest their souls.