Human Error

The fatal collision on Friday evening between a large airliner and a small plane on the ground at Los Angeles International Airport, one of the nation's busiest, comes as no surprise to aviation experts who have been issuing warnings about dangerously congested runway conditions nationwide. "We know that the two planes did collide on the (ground)," said Elly Brekke, a regional spokeswoman for the Federal Aviation Administration.

Hope of finding survivors on the half-submerged Costa Concordia waned Monday after rescuers found a sixth victim, three days after the giant luxury liner ran aground off the Italian coast in an accident that increasingly appeared to have been avoidable. Both judicial and media attention was concentrated Monday on ascertaining what led to the tragedy that one prosecutor said was due to an "inexcusable" maneuver by the ship's captain, who remained in custody. The sixth victim was a still-unidentified male passenger who was found on the second bridge of the ship wearing a life jacket.

BET executive Stephen Hill is taking responsibility for the Chris Brown-Rihanna snafu that shook up the BET Awards Sunday. A contest winner announced the recipient of the Coca-Cola Viewers Choice award from results on her tablet computer. She first said that Brown had won, then corrected herself and said Rihanna was the winner. At the end of the ceremony, host Kevin Hart brought out Brown to tell him he was actually the winner of the trophy. Hill, president of music programming and specials for BET, tweeted Monday "That BET Awards Viewer's Choice mix-up was due to human error.

Hundreds of people have been wrongly imprisoned inside the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department jails in recent years, with some spending weeks behind bars before authorities realized those arrested were mistaken for wanted criminals, a Times investigation has found. The wrongful incarcerations occurred more than 1,480 times in the last five years. They were the result of a variety of factors, including officials' overlooking fingerprint evidence and working off incomplete records.

A power failure that plunged large parts of the state into the dark this week was caused primarily by human error, the state's largest electric company said. Florida Power & Light issued a report saying that a field engineer was to blame for the failure, which affected more than 1 million people.

Re Robert W. Welkos' article "Why 'Being Human' Misfired" (May 17): His portrait of why the film is failing to reach audiences is revealing of the business machinations of Hollywood, but not very telling about the movie. Welkos explains that when National Research Group asked people how they'd like to see a movie about a man searching for his place in the world, "only 2% of males over 25 said it was their first choice of a film to watch this weekend while 1% of males and females under 25 said it was their first choice."

Now, it seems funny. But for a few moments, it was anything but. Emerging from the swank Rio Suite Hotel & Casino in Las Vegas early last Monday morning, I was shocked to find that my car was missing from guest parking, where I had left it the afternoon before. Obviously, it had to have been stolen. Mentally, I made plans to rent a car to get myself and my guests back to Los Angeles, where I would have to buy a new car two or three years early.

Friday's tragic Metrolink crash in Chatsworth, which killed 25 people, was not the only fatal rail accident last week. Less than an hour after the Chatsworth crash, a car was struck by a Metrolink train in Corona and the driver killed in a grade-crossing accident. According to the Federal Railroad Administration, 74 people have died in Metrolink crashes since 1999 in California. And in a total of 821 accidents, 90 people have died on the Metropolitan Transportation Authority's L.A.-Long Beach Blue Line from its inception in July 1990 to July 2008.

The chief designer of the Chernobyl atomic plant said Monday that he believes human error and not a technical failure led to the worst disaster in the history of the nuclear power industry. Ivan Y. Yemelyanov, a non-voting member of the Soviet Academy of Sciences, also said in an interview with Western reporters that the Soviet Union does not build containment domes over its reactors because they do not guarantee safety and can lead to a false sense of security.

A day after a U.S. Navy missile killed five Turkish sailors and injured 13 others during an exercise in the Aegean Sea, Defense Department officials said that a preliminary investigation points to human error, rather than mechanical malfunction, as the most likely cause of the accident. The episode occurred about 3 p.m. PDT Thursday as the aircraft carrier Saratoga was circling the Turkish destroyer Muavenet in a mock-hostile encounter on the high seas.

The good doctor Re "Trying to heal a system's flaws," Oct. 5 How could Medicare and Medicaid chief Donald Berwick, the esteemed patriotic doctor who has the answers for fixing the mistakes and mismanagement of Medicare, possibly be a "lightning rod for criticism" in the halls of Congress? And why would President Obama circumvent the Senate confirmation process when he could have put this incredible medical professional before the American people and shamed any member of the Senate for not confirming him?

A "series of failings" by the pilots occurred in the minutes before an Air France flight crashed into the Atlantic en route from Rio de Janeiro to Paris, killing all 228 people on board, according to a new French air investigation report. The crew could have saved Flight 447, which crashed on June 1, 2009, after it lost vital readings when speed sensors iced up. However, members of the crew had insufficient training to deal with the situation and failed to respond correctly, ignoring repeated stall warnings and failing to react properly to the stall, according to the report from France's air investigation authority, the BEA. "The situation was salvageable," BEA director Jean Paul Troadec told reporters.

BET executive Stephen Hill is taking responsibility for the Chris Brown-Rihanna snafu that shook up the BET Awards Sunday. A contest winner announced the recipient of the Coca-Cola Viewers Choice award from results on her tablet computer. She first said that Brown had won, then corrected herself and said Rihanna was the winner. At the end of the ceremony, host Kevin Hart brought out Brown to tell him he was actually the winner of the trophy. Hill, president of music programming and specials for BET, tweeted Monday "That BET Awards Viewer's Choice mix-up was due to human error.

What if you held an election and the person who was supposed to bring the ballots didn't show? That's what happened Tuesday morning at one polling place in Venice. We may live in a high-tech society, but in L.A. County, at least the act of voting remains decidedly low-tech. You step up to a little plastic booth with a paper card and mark it with an inky stylus and then stick it in a plastic tub. So when the election inspector for Precinct 9001554A in Venice was a no-show at 6 a.m. at the Venice Methodist United Church polling location, the poll workers found themselves without ballots, vote recorders, portable booths or the voter roster — only an hour before the polls opened.

Searchers combed a steep, wooded hillside in southern India on Saturday for the remains of 158 passengers and crew of an Air India Express flight and clues to the cause of the country's worst aviation accident in a decade. With the voice recorder not yet recovered, it was unclear why Flight IX-812, carrying mostly migrant workers returning from the Persian Gulf, overshot the runway in Mangalore and plunged down the hillside early Saturday. Officials said the weather was good at the time, and there were no indications of mechanical problems or a communications mix-up with air traffic control.

President Obama's leading counter-terrorism advisor said Sunday that human error, not turf battles among federal intelligence officials, allowed an Al Qaeda-trained operative to carry out an attempt to bomb a Detroit-bound passenger plane on Christmas Day. Deputy national security advisor John Brennan, in appearances on several morning television news programs, also said there was "no smoking gun" of intelligence gathered by American officials that...

President Obama's leading counter-terrorism advisor said Sunday that human error, not turf battles among federal intelligence officials, allowed an Al Qaeda-trained operative to carry out an attempt to bomb a Detroit-bound passenger plane on Christmas Day. Deputy national security advisor John Brennan, in appearances on several morning television news programs, also said there was "no smoking gun" of intelligence gathered by American officials that...

Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano wisely has backed off her statement that "the system worked" because a Nigerian terrorist failed to blow up an airliner on Christmas Day. The system decidedly didn't work if an explosive could be brought aboard a plane by a man whose radicalization had been brought to the attention of the United States by his father, a prominent banker. But as Congress and the Obama administration undertake inquests into this near disaster, their primary focus should be on lapses in human intelligence, not technology.