I see your point, but repeated over 1000 trials, they're much the same. Eventually a mistake will be made, and unless safeguards are in place, someone will die. That's why you see the "swiss cheese" model in safety classes. Every pilot will make a dangerous error eventually, but a procedure, or automation, or a system, will stop the holes in the cheese from all lining up.
I've seen the swiss cheese model, and that kind of explains my point of view. You say pilots make dangerous errors, but procedures/systems/etc prevents the holes in the cheese from lining up. So, even if the pilot's action is "dangerous", is it truly dangerous if the systems/etc keep something from happening?
By your analogy, tightrope walking accross the Grand Canyon isn't dangerous, because it will be fine as long as he makes 0 mistakes.
Again, illustrates my point of view. Tightroping across the Grand Canyon, yeah, probably pretty dangerous, but that's due to external influences, i.e., wind, birds, whatever pushing him off. However, tightrope that same distance at a height of 2 feet, would you still say it's dangerous? So, tightroping in itself isn't "dangerous".
It's dangerous because there are no safeguards--it's very unforgiving of mistakes.
Right, no safeguards. Would you still consider tightroping across the Grand Canyon dangerous if the guy wore a parachute?
Don't fleet helicopters have double and triple redundancies on hydraulic systems? Those safeguards reduce the risk to a level that if you lose all of your hydraulic systems, either you're just one unlucky dude or some serious mistake was made, since you have to have hydraulics to fly a 60. The odds of all pumps failing, pretty slim, so something more than likely would have to been done wrong to cause them to fail, be it wrong hydraulic fluid or improper maintenance. So, the helicopter itself is safe to fly but unforgiving if you do something wrong.
Here's a question for A4's and the rest of the tailhookers. Is it dangerous to land on a boat if you fly exactly what the LSO tells you to do, and you fly a perfect ball all the way to a 3 wire? I'd argue no, but it's unforgiving if said pilot ignores the LSO, spots the deck and decides to pull power and ends up landing hard on a 1 wire, maybe even pancaking the plane. What caused the 1 wire? It wasn't anything with the plane going wrong, it was a mistake by the pilot and flying wrong. So, unforgiving of a bad approach. Obviously, I'll defer to someone who has actually trapped, but I think that's a relevant example.
The way I look at it is, why does Naval Aviation label incidents as "mishaps" instead of "accidents"? Again, maybe semantics, but I think it illustrates the differences between dangerous and unforgiving. I still think that something is dangerous if it's something that's a result of being outside of your control, but it's unforgiving if it's a result of a mistake you make on your own.
