Saturday, May 17, 2008

Interesting court trial

The last couple of week, there was a court trial regarding the CFIT accident of a Crossair airplane on November 24, 2001 in Zürich/Switzerland. You can find a brief description of the accident here.
The full report of the Aircraft Accident Investigation Bureau can be downloaded from their website.
Now the two top executives of Crossair, CEO Moritz Suter and his Deputy at the time, André Dosé (later became the CEO of Crossair and Swiss International Airlines) were accused for negligent homicide in 24 cases. Personally I don't like to see that tendency in general: People who have absolutely nothing to do with the event whatsoever, are taken under fire with the goal to find somebody to blame. Excuse me, it was an accident! So if somebody's son kills somebody in a car accident, the parents will be blamed for it because they let him use their car or what??
Anyway, the sentence was: free of all charges, which I appreciate. When you read the final report you will find out that the pilot wasn't quite up to his task and you could question whether he should have been in an airliner cockpit at all. But what's that got to do with the CEO? Can it be Steve Ballmer's (CEO Microsoft) or Steve Jobs' (CEO Apple) problem, if some programmer is not up to his tasks and makes errors over and over again? I don't think so, for that there are executives on a lower level. I have to say "thank you USA" for this ridiculous legal system, where McDonalds can blamed for not warning the people that hot coffee is indeed hot.
However, now that Suter and Dosé are free of the charges, every idiot comes out of his corner and assumes himself to be qualified to comment about it (including myself as you can see *wink*). Comments like: "Of course, you just need to be able to pay expensive lawyers", "I knew, they won't be blamed, it's a shame", "those judges are useless" and alikes can be read on the Swiss TV's website. Oh really? So those judges are not up to their task? You would be better, right? And who do you want to blame for appointing such terrible judges? The President? God almighty? The gardener (the gardener is always guilty...)?
Again, people misunderstand the term "democracy" here. Democracy means, we are ALLOWED to have an opinion. It doesn't mean we MUST have one. In other words. He who has not a clue, should shut the f* up!
And when it comes to aviation, my view is: Nobody has a clue, except eventually the people in aviation themselves-

2 comments:

Hans-Peter Zimmermann said...

As I already commented on the Swissair trial:
Corti and friends did nothing wrong, legally. They were just stupid.
If, however, stupidity were a legal offense, every journalist who believes to have a right to comment would face a lifelong sentence ;-)

Beat Zimmermann said...

I couldn't agree more! :-)