"Deep Trouble" for the BEA?
Quote from the piece referred to above by jcjeant (English translation of the original French):
"... BEA has never considered the possibility of "stalling".
…BEA has never contemplated that the A 330 could have come out of its flight. The BEA, however, only determined the search area according to the inverse hypothesis that "in view of the maximum possible speed of the aircraft, the wreckage of the plane had to be in a circle of 75 km radius (the circle) centered on the last reporting point position (LKP) "(Mr. TROADEC note of 8 April 2011).
"Deep trouble" for the BEA.
Only fair, I think, to point out the source of these accusations. It's a website called "Les Dossiers Noir du transport aérien" (Air Transport's Black Files), a "Blog citoyen d'un ancien commandant de bord" (Citizen's blog by a former airline captain).
One or two names spring to mind... As far as I'm aware, the accusations made are nonsense.
How can the writer say that the BEA has never contemplated stalling or departure from flight envelope ("sortir de son domaine de vol") ?
How can it be wrong for the BEA to define a circle of radius 75 km (40 nm) from the LKP as the search area? To my knowledge the BEA has never stated that the accident could not have taken place at or close to the LKP. (We still don't know where it happened, but that's another matter.) If they had defined and searched smaller circle, and the debris had turned out to be outside it, would that have led to another version of this conspiracy theory?
With the benefit of hindsight, the apparent failure to search closer to the LKP in Phase 3 looks unfortunate, but the difficult search seems to have been prioritised in the areas of highest probability. Eventually, the two search vessels (Anne Candies and Seabed Worker) simply ran out of time last year.
To accuse the BEA or any other organisation of deliberately ignoring the most likely site of the debris is preposterous. In any case, they would have known that the industry would never let them get away with it long-term. However frustrated the interested parties are with the delay in finding the main debris field, and however much we would all like to have unrestricted access to its progress, it seems to this amateur observer that the BEA is supplying a similar amount of information to that which has been disseminated in other investigations of comparable complexity.
Last edited by Chris Scott; 27th Apr 2011 at 17:05.