One thing you will never see in professional mishap investigations, military or civilian, is a comment that "accidents happen." While grated those often involve more direct risk to life and limb, I'd argue the event of the past weekend could have easily turned out quite differently.
Additionally, there is never any hesitation to call out pilot errors, decision making errors, or safety management system errors. They're brutally honest, and nobody gets a break because "they're a good guy." Bad decisions that result in a mishap are not tolerated, and there are consequences, I've even been privileged to work for people (part of the endorsement chain) who have even faulted themselves for failures in leadership or management. Furthermore, many in the endorsing chain render opinions despite not being qualified in the aircraft or perhaps even an aviator. They don't ask "are you a waiver holder" as a way of shutting down dialog.
I'm not in any way advocating this level of investigation following a mishap, but I contend the willingness to take an uncompromising and highly self critical look at themselves is what contributes to a strong safety culture, combined with clear actions to ensure there are checks, balances, and accountability for behavior and decisions in the system.
If you discount my input because I do not hold a turbine waiver, then go ahead and ignore this as well. If you're interested in reading the type of safety culture in which I "grew up", here's a rare public posting of a Judge Advocate General report into a mishap. Formal mishap reports are protected by law from public distribution, this is the legal FOIA discoverable companion. Everything said to a mishap investigator is protected by legal privilege, and people are indeed prosecuted. The idea behind that is to ensure that nobody holds back from telling the whole story, no need to protect anyone's name or reputation, as the report is geared toward one thing - ensuring that the same failure mechanism never happens again.
This JAGMAN happened ashore, so everyone in the endorsing chain were in fact aviators, though Commander Naval Air Forces Pacific for example, was not qualified in the aircraft, yet he was the ultimate endorser. Note that there is no hesitation to fault the pilot, no pulling punches because they perished.
Note the statement on page 8, para 1 of the pdf (it's 47mb - sorry), where the unit commander put himself to blame in his own endorsement when he said "I am responsible and accountable for the safety climate and standardization as the squadron Commanding Officer. My climate and process did not detect and correct a flaw..."
Note that his boss talked about "gaps in leadership, oversight" and other areas that contributed to the mishap (pg 4, para 4).
Again, no pulling punches, and blunt self examination. Two things I think would be of benefit, but then again I don't hold a waiver.
http://news.usni.org/2014/03/12/docu...-prowler-crash