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I'm sick of the term "pilot error." A true pilot error is a rare event. But what is so often labeled a pilot error is actually a pilot decision that didn't result in the outcome expected by the pilot, the regulators or the public.
Real pilot errors can only occur in transport-category airplanes that are being flown to the FAR Part 121 standards that govern the major airlines. This type of flying is the safest that we know how to do, or at least is the safest tradeoff our society is willing to make when it compares risk to financial costs and convenience. Business jet operators may choose to fly their transport-category airplanes to an even higher safety standard than the airlines, and many do.
The reason that true pilot errors can only happen in this highest level of flying is because every reasonably foreseeable circumstance has been addressed in the design and certification of the airplane, the training of the pilots and the operational rules they fly under.
For example, a transport-category airplane must have multiple electrical systems, each capable of powering the entire airplane under night IFR conditions. But even two or three independent electrical systems with their own generating sources do not rise to the very highest level of redundancy required, so the aircraft batteries must be able to power essential IFR equipment for at least 30 minutes to allow the pilots to land the airplane after even the worst happens.
Redundant engine power is another obvious requirement in the transport category. Flight control operation, brakes, pressurization, lighting and all other critical systems must be backed up to the point that certification authorities agree the total loss of any critical function will not happen more than once in a billion flights. That is the same standard applied to the primary structure of the airplane.
The pilots must be trained to the highest level and retrained regularly. And there must always be more than one pilot fully qualified to fly the airplane under all conditions. The operating rules stipulate significant margins of runway length for takeoff and landing and set absolute limits on weather conditions such as visibility and wind. In other words, a large number of people have been sitting around for years thinking of things that can go wrong in flight and then defining a way to prevent those inevitable failures from leading to a crash.
So when a transport airplane flying to the airline standards does crash, somebody made an error. It could be a mistake by the pilots, for sure, but it could also be an error in design, certification, maintenance or dispatch, because every function is held to the same high standard. After most major jet accidents a series of errors is documented because the layers of redundancy in the operation are so complete that a single mistake won't bring the airplane down.
