Luckily, aviation investigations haven't concluded with "pilot error" for over half a century, or else there would be a lot more accidents as we never fixed any of the actual causes and just blamed the dead pilots.
Luckily, aviation investigations haven't concluded with "pilot error" for over half a century, or else there would be a lot more accidents as we never fixed any of the actual causes and just blamed the dead pilots.
Sure they do. Go search recent NTSB reports and you'll see it. Normally it's described a bit more elaborately, e.g. "The pilot’s failure to maintain a proper glidepath during landing which resulted in a landing short of the runway." But there are plenty of modern reports that do nothing but blame the pilot.
Certainly it's a lot less common than it used to be. There's a bigger push to find underlying causes that can be fixed, and not just say "the pilot forgot to perform a crucial step out of the several dozen crucial pre-flight items they were supposed to have committed to memory, sucks to be them" or whatever. But sometimes it really is "the pilot did a dumb and shouldn't have," especially for smaller planes with less experienced pilots.
And why did the pilot fail to maintain a proper glide path?
If he was drunk, then sure, pilot error. If he was insufficiently trained, why did he think that he had a sufficient level of training for this flight? If he had too much get-there-itis, is there anything in the training that could help prevent that? Seems there is surely potential training changes relating to GPS dependence.
No reason is given. That quote is the entirety of the "Probable Cause and Findings" from the report in question.
German Wings 9525 was labelled pilot "error" tbf
I'm sorry, what? Pilot error is absolutely a factor in contemporary accidents. It's the most common one, in fact, because we've rooted out almost all the other risks.
And why did the pilot make the error?