I've been a pilot since I was 16 and have spent more than one hangar flying session where a fellow pilot's accident or death was analyzed, speculated, discussed or what ever you want to call it. Fully determining and understanding what happened is only a small part of what it's about. It does become largely hypothetical at times but that process is important as it causes the people involves to think about possible responses and consequences to those situations and that goes an awful long way toward mentally paving the way to make the correct decisions when a similar or related event occurs to anyone involved in the discussion.
The thing is, if you take the moral high ground and discuss and speculate about only purely hypothetical situations rather than accidents, then the discussion has no weight or validity as in the back of your mind, the potential exists to think...yeah, like that could really happen. So, like it or not, the process is much more realistic and effective when a body is involved, even if the actual facts remain somewhat nebulous and hypothetical.
As a pilot, and as a diver, I understand that speculating about accidents is one of the crucial ways that people learn disseminate and process information to better develop their fund of responses when things go wrong. For a pilot, when things go south you often have little time to formulate the correct response and that sort of contemplation over someone else's accident and/or death and the responses they could have, should have, or would have made is vital. As a diver you may also have time pressure and/or you may have to make the decision under the effects of narcosis, and if you have not considered responses before, you are in a poor position to consider them now, in what may otherwise be your final moments.
So as both a pilot and a diver, I fully expect and even demand that people freely pick the bones of what ever accident killed me apart, even if some suggest I had a brain fart and caused my own demise, which in the majority of cases is usually true to some extent somewhere in the chain of events that led to the accident where a better choice would have broken the chain. I'd greatly prefer to have it discussed, speculated and maybe even known exactly how I screwed up, as the speculation and precontemplation that occurs may save one more person froma death or accident that would otherwise occur. I'll regard it as the last service I can provide to either of those fine commuities that I belonged to.
I appreciate the need for an appropriate amout of sentiment and the need to carry a due amount of respect for the departed, but we also need to get on with living and discussion, analyzing, and speculating, even the wild totally unsupported kind, has a vital role to play in that.
