alt Hacker NewsLuckily, 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.