In reply to Jack Geldard - Editor - UKC:
I think the analogy between the aviation industry's safety system and anything I've seen reported on UKC is very weak, and that's the root of the difficulties.
All aviation accident investigation is done by professionals. For the most part, these professionals are held in very high esteem by the aviation community; they have experience, intellects and access to facilities and knowledge that have won and maintained them considerable respect. And, when sometimes respect isn't enough, they can wield regulatory powers...
It may be that for technical equipment failures, the analogy is not so bad - the BMC can peer at a broken bolt and talk to DMM and good results follow which are not to be sniffed at. But of course, as in aviation, the "technical failure" accidents are a tiny proportion of the total.
So for the important majority; failures of brains due to
IM SAFE
(Illness, Medication, Stress, Alcohol, Fatigue, Eating), the more biblical "weakness, negligence or our own deliberate fault" or the directly climbing-related ambition, peer pressure, inexperience, showing off (why else do we climb, after all ?!) we are left with the kangaroo court of ill-informed, prejudiced, inexperienced people who know little or nothing about any of the subjects you need to know to do a half-decent "human factors" accident investigation.
I'm not trying to be hard on ordinary people who are trying to do their best to dig some good out of the wreckage. But we should be realistic about what they are capable of achieving. If you want to see the pathetic rambling bitchiness that paid professionals in the aviation industry (not the investigators) carry on with take a look at www.pprune.org/forums ; UKC can be pretty crass from time to time, but at least any attempts to boast of specialist knowledge get tested pretty fast and hard.
My conclusion: The accidents we should and could learn from are almost all caused directly related to human behaviour. Even in aviation those are tough to learn from, and that's almost all professionals investigating professionals. I think there's very little analogy between aviation and writeups by interested punters on UKC that we can learn from. I reckon the divers or parachutists or stunt co-ordinators for Jackass could be worth listening to...
(I spent seven years in aviation engineering, two rather dull ones as a System Safety Eng on a dodgy aeroplane that combined all the accidents of a helicopter with all the accidents of a fast jet. Who cares ?)