Principles

In reviewing accident reports, there is often either an implication or sometimes a frank statement that the pilot, if adequately trained, competent, or prepared, would not have made the mistakes in perception or judgment that contributed to the accident. This leads to a presumption of incompetence, carelessness, or recklessness against the pilot. Any pilot who's had an incident has felt this prejudice.

On the contrary, my thesis is that most accidents are due to errors in judgment that are made because of unsuspected or unverifiable perceptual error, and happen to pilots who feel they are exercising prudent judgment and are trying to be faithful to their training.

As an aside, I state without further analysis here, that some common training paradigms create pilots that are prone to error; this varies according to the traditions passed on to individual instructors. I have not researched this training phenomenon sufficiently well to offer examples. .