Being Offered an Alternative to Prosecution: The Lived Experience of General Aviation Pilots and Prosecutors

Sammanfattning: Background To learn from incidents, it is imperative that people involved feel safe to share their complete unadulterated stories without fearing punishment. Recently, the Netherlands Public Prosecution Service has begun to offer general aviation pilots an alternative to prosecution. Objective Gain insights into the lived experiences of the adjudged pilots and the public prosecutor for aviation and its policy employee to understand how they experienced this new way in which the public prosecutor resolved law violations. Method A phenomenology-inspired methodology was constructed based on Moustakas (1994) to create rich and vivid descriptions of the lived experiences of the informants. Findings The pilots were found to experience being a ‘suspect’ in a criminal investigation for a law-violating error they made as if entering a different realm, going from being just any pilot to being a suspect in a criminal investigation. However, they experienced the hearing with the public prosecutor as an empathic, non-judging, mature conversation, and they felt that the eventual solution, sharing lessons learned with peers through a presentation, was mature and fitting as opposed to paying an easily forgotten fine. The public prosecutor and policy employee experienced the process as rewarding, yielding more than giving a fine or prosecuting and as respect-invoking for pilots showing self-critique and taking responsibility after an occurrence. Implications The findings demonstrate the importance of treating people who unintentionally found themselves playing a causal role in an occurrence with respect, understanding and compassion, thereby enabling learning and entering into meaningful dialogue with people hurt by that occurrence. The findings further showed that forgiveness could play a valuable role in Just Culture. Also, it showed a similarity between how the public prosecutor judged the actions and behaviour of the pilots and Bosk’s (2003) findings on how attending physicians treat errors from their resident physicians. The accountability asked from and shown by the pilots can be characterised as prospective, empirically reinforcing the argument for a (more) restorative Just Culture (Dekker, 2017).