Five months in jail (and PTSD) - pilot found criminally negligent fornot following a preflight checklist

On Friday, February 14, 2014 1:03:15 PM UTC-5, Soartech wrote:

There is not a culture (in hang gliding) of using a written, rigid check list. Yet, like us, they assemble their craft before every flight.

I see that the title that I chose for this topic reflects my hasty interpretation.

To put this in a more correct context, the pilot plead "guilty". He was not found guilty of not using a checklist. But I think that it would have boiled down to that if the case had been tried.

excerpt from article:
Had Orders (the pilot) performed those safety checks, Godinez-Avila's family would have been spared the heartbreak they now endure, said B.C. Supreme Court Judge Brian Joyce.

"I do not accept the suggestion made ... that what occurred here was merely a momentary loss of attention," Joyce told the court.

"There is a clearly established procedure that is to be followed in conducting a tandem hang-gliding flight. ... Mr. Orders failed to do all of these things."

So unlike the judge, I find it easy to accept that due to a "momentary loss of attention" the pilot simply forgot to check the passenger's attachment to the hang glider. Like every other human, my memory is faulty and I'm prone to distraction. The judge expected the pilot to follow the "clearly established procedure". So the judge expected the pilot to flawlessly remember and execute all of those steps. That is an unreasonable expectation and if the case had been tried, the point would have been clarified.

I speculate that it would have come out in trial, that knowing the unreliability of his memory, the pilot was negligent every time he flew without a written pre-flight checklist.

My take away is that some future prosecutor will argue that it is criminally negligent to NOT use a written preflight checklist. In the meantime, that judge in Canada expects pilots to have perfect memories, so we might as well use written checklists.