The coupling of refusal to act on available information and aircraft crash seems like a plausible hypothesis. And the hypothesis coupling the agency's goals with accidents ignores the fact that the interests of groups concerned with safety and those of profit-making organizations like the airlines will conflict regardless of how the agency is configured. The most troubling aspect of this process of coupling in news work is its selectivity. An alternative view of cause and effect would assume that everything people do on behalf of the organizations responsible for administering safety is part of a continuous and complex causal sequence winding through and beyond any catastrophe. The more proximate the act, the more likely it is to be coupled with some catastrophic outcome.
Proximate acts have two characteristics.
They are proximate in the sense of being located in time closer to the outcome that they are alleged to have caused. Less proximate acts are those that took place farther back in time. However, this temporal dimension masks a more important aspect of proximity. Proximate acts are the things that operators and inspectors do, for example. It is this aspect of proximity that is reflected in empirical data showing operator error to be the most frequent officially-selected cause of many types of technological accidents.