The "lost confidence" angle would be discarded if it was just made-up nonsense. It is also a convenient angle to pin the blame on a scapegoat who was proven to have zero blame or responsibility.
One can only imagine what would have been written on the guy if he crashed and went down with the plane. Certainly we would be reading about human errors and failures in judgement and lack of training and reckless behavior.
This is what mid/upper management types do in large organizations to cover their ass.
I recall a story about a high-speed train accident in Spain where the conductor was found to be the sole responsible due to speeding, and it took an investigator from the European Union to call out the company's managers for unexplainably failing to implement and run a pretty standard traffic control system on that track section whose basic features include automatically enforcing speed limits. The system would render impossible that sort of failure and, in spite of having been installed, it was unexplainably disconnected. But it was human error, of course.
