The United States leads the world in airline safety. That’s because of the way we assign blame when accidents do happen.

From the article:

In the aftermath of a disaster, our immediate reaction is often to search for some person to blame. Authorities frequently vow to “find those responsible” and “hold them to account,” as though disasters happen only when some grinning mischief-maker slams a big red button labeled “press for catastrophe.” That’s not to say that negligence ought to go unpunished. Sometimes there really is a malefactor to blame, but equally often there isn’t, and the result is that normal people who just made a mistake are caught up in the dragnet of vengeance, like the famous 2009 case of six Italian seismologists who were charged for failing to predict a deadly earthquake. But when that happens, what is actually accomplished? Has anything been made better? Or have we simply kicked the can down the road?

It’s often much more productive to ask why than to ask who. In some industries, this is called a “blameless postmortem,” and in aviation, it’s a long-standing, internationally formalized tradition. In the mid-20th century, when technical investigations of aircraft accidents were first being standardized, an understanding emerged that many crashes were not the result of any particular person’s actions. Most famously, in 1956, the Civil Aeronautics Board’s Bureau of Aviation Safety, the predecessor to today’s NTSB, concluded that no one was at fault in a collision of two airliners over the Grand Canyon because the two crews likely could not have seen each other coming until it was too late. The cause of the accident, they determined, was the lack of any positive means to prevent midair collisions.

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Sometimes, employers independently decide to fire pilots involved in accidents, but the practice is subject to heavy criticism from pilots’ unions and just culture experts. Equally as often, pilots who make honest mistakes get to keep their jobs, such as the first officer aboard American Airlines flight 1420, whose failure to arm the ground spoilers before landing in Little Rock in 1999 contributed to a runway overrun accident that killed 11 people. As of 2019 he was still flying for American Airlines — and had been promoted to captain — because his mistake was due to deeper cultural issues in the airline industry. And besides, given what he went through, it’s hard to imagine that he would ever forget to arm the spoilers again.