> Well, I'd say the point is to prevent the failure of any one part of the system from producing unacceptable outcomes rather than preventing the failure of any one part of the system
That's effectively what I was trying to say. I didn't get all the way there, though, and you've stated it quite nicely.
I guess part of the reason that people are suggesting this is indicative of systemic problems is that there's very little in the way of compounding factors. Yes the glide path indicator was non-operational, but that didn't cause 20 crashes that day. It had been out for quite some time (http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-equipment-out-of...). Many other planes landed safely. From what I understand (http://www.weather.com/news/san-francisco-plane-crash-weathe...) the weather was fairly clear so that didn't play in.
A lot of the analysis I've read seems to indicate that this was basically a rookie-esque mistake and that there's no possible way such a thing should have happened. That there should have been 20 checks to make sure that this guy wasn't authorized to fly the plane, but that for whatever reason, none of them were acted upon. At that point it's a systemic problem.
I would be looking at this very differently if there were a bunch of bad circumstances beyond his control that converged in ways completely unforseeable and as a result of that there was a crash. But from what I can tell, this was a very nice day to be flying around SFO.
EDIT: I just realized that I got really off-topic. Whoops!
That's effectively what I was trying to say. I didn't get all the way there, though, and you've stated it quite nicely.
I guess part of the reason that people are suggesting this is indicative of systemic problems is that there's very little in the way of compounding factors. Yes the glide path indicator was non-operational, but that didn't cause 20 crashes that day. It had been out for quite some time (http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-equipment-out-of...). Many other planes landed safely. From what I understand (http://www.weather.com/news/san-francisco-plane-crash-weathe...) the weather was fairly clear so that didn't play in.
A lot of the analysis I've read seems to indicate that this was basically a rookie-esque mistake and that there's no possible way such a thing should have happened. That there should have been 20 checks to make sure that this guy wasn't authorized to fly the plane, but that for whatever reason, none of them were acted upon. At that point it's a systemic problem.
I would be looking at this very differently if there were a bunch of bad circumstances beyond his control that converged in ways completely unforseeable and as a result of that there was a crash. But from what I can tell, this was a very nice day to be flying around SFO.
EDIT: I just realized that I got really off-topic. Whoops!