This incident is a puzzle. It's not a crusade to enshrine my father's reputation, despite Megan's assessment. It's not a jihad against the CAB, and I accuse the investigators not of dishonesty but of sloppy work. I'm not trying to crucify long-dead investigators, I'm trying to determine what they got wrong and why. I'm amused by all the free psychoanalysis, but this is simply a puzzle. Because I have a stake in it, I intend to solve it.
I have not questioned the root cause, and see no call to. I question things in the CAB and ALPA reports only when they make no sense. All I'm working on is the impact and breakup sequence. I don't question that the CAB fulfilled their basic role of explaining the incident and helping to correct the system that led to it. I accept that an unsafetied fitting was the cause.
Within the scope of the CAB's charter, a poor description of the impact sequence is probably not a gross or egregious error. I suspect it was an afterthought, and once the root cause was known the impact sequence description may have been banged out by a flunkie. But my scope is not the entire incident; my scope is the impact sequence because that's where I took issue. And within the scope of the impact sequence, the description error is gross and egregious.
The CAB report makes a clear statement about the sequence, and the simplest reading of it is that the plane slid tail first and right side up to the final wreckage site. The CAB was clear that the plane went tail first the final 820 feet. I'm delighted that people seem to be coming to grips with the fact that this didn't actually happen. What you are doing is what I did three years ago when I had to digest the same uncomfortable reality.
My family always took investigation reports as Holy Writ. There are no mistakes there. When upon studying the images I found that the plane was upside down, I had to square this with the report. I tried imagining the plane breaking apart approximately at that final site, the tail flipping over near the wings.
https://ibb.co/jSVpsG is a picture of the aft fuselage before fire has consumed much of it. From the length of fuselage at that point, and comparing to the overhead view at
https://ibb.co/kvz8N6, it's clearly in contact with the wings but has partly collapsed. Notice the apparently extreme damage to the belly. It took a helluva pounding.
I tried to imagine the tail breaking off and rolling independently. The closeness to the wings makes that unlikely. The aft fuselage as seen in the overhead view is within half a dozen feet of correct alignment with the wing root, and if the aft fuselage rolled over it would be half a fuselage circumference away. I tried persuading myself that I was misreading the image, until I studied the landing gear structure which confirms the wing is upside down. I tried to imagine the wings, having broken from the tail, flipping on their latitudinal axis. But the leading edge faces east, meaning that from an upright slide the wings must have flipped on their longitudinal axis. That means the tail and wings are in the same orientation and in contact, and the main body ended at that site upside down. To suggest that the wings and aft fuselage parted, gyrated each in some independent way, and ended up back in their correct relative orientation but both rotated 180 degrees, is beyond belief.
It probably took me a couple weeks to accept that the CAB report was simply wrong. It was a Holy Toledo moment, I assure you. Saying that the plane slid tail first to the final site is by itself so woefully inadequate that "wrong" is an appropriate term to apply, so I do, because "woefully inadequate" is tedious to key in. If I told my wife I drove to the store and came home, and she later found I came home by taxi because I totalled the car, she would make it clear that my statement was so woefully inadequate as to be simply wrong.
So the questions present themselves. Why did the CAB leave us with such a woefully inadequate statement? What really happened? This is the puzzle. People making excuses for the woeful inadequacy of the CAB report is a good indicator that people are ready to consider the puzzle. If you're looking for wiggle room, you're starting to grasp the issue.
The CAB explicitly said the plane slid tail first the last 820 feet, though it doesn't explicitly say the plane was upright the whole way. The total path from first embankment impact was 1200 feet, the second impact was at 380 feet, and from then the plane slid. So although the CAB report doesn't say the plane slid tail first until it stopped, it also doesn't say the plane slid 821 feet and it does say it was tail first for 820 feet. Megan took issue with this, but the simplest reading is that the plane stopped. So the plane slid upright or inverted, but per the CAB it slid tail first until it didn't slide any more.
The vertical stabilizer is mostly intact, and the plane did not slide on it. As Cordwainer quoted Flaps: " If the aircraft were upside down the vertical stabilizer would have been destroyed. Instead it is nearly intact." This leaves us with a conundrum. The plane did not slide inverted, and it could not slide upright and tail first and leave us with inverted tail-first wreckage. Therefore it could not have slid tail first the final 820 feet.
This constitutes an error on the part of the CAB. The common term for this is "wrong". It doesn't mean the investigators were dishonest or evil. I have no doubt some or most of them knew exactly what happened. But what got into the final report is a wrong statement, and it's the same wrong scenario that the CAB gave to the Chicago Trib on the day of the crash. This is the puzzle. Why was the CAB spokesman so sure so early? Why was that not walked back?
I didn't start this project with an agenda to demonstrate a belly landing. I started with the overhead picture and bafflement. After due consideration, the arrival at the final wreckage looks like a high-energy nose-first approach. I can't square this with a backward slide of any kind. What looks like an agenda to someone reading this for the first time is merely the product of three years' hypotheses, testing, discarding, and starting over. Concours77 just shot down my scenario of a forward pitchover at the final site, by noticing the post in the ditch. So I have to start over and form a new hypothesis, which led to my very interesting flight sim of the damaged plane at
.
This is how solutions are found. You start with a conjecture, a hypothesis, and look for evidence that either supports or refutes it. I challenge anyone to describe a mystery that was solved without any conjectures. I try to keep the reader clear on my level of confidence in the various statements that I propose for others to critique. That's how conversations work. Steel is sharpened against stone; people sharpen against people. Read the title of the thread.
Over those three years the thin evidence at hand has coalesced to suggest a low-bank initial impact. Megan's dismissal aside, I see no evidence against a low bank and considerable evidence for it. The investigators had a wealth of data that is unavailable to me. They had debris maps and internal memos and hundreds of pictures, no doubt. They might have taken measurements of the broken electrical lines, and those might have shown the bank angle. Megan wanted me to take her conjecture on this as if it were evidence, but it's only conjecture.
I point out the CAB error not to take satisfaction trumpeting it from the rooftops, but because recognizing the error is the first step in solving the puzzle. Something went wrong in this investigation. The official reports describe an impact and breakup scenario that does not correspond to the pictures.
People working only from the narrative have a harder time seeing this, so I did the animation. If you look at an animation and say "Well THAT didn't happen" then the puzzle gets clearer. When I started the animation I had to build the virtual site, and until then I didn't know it would show how tight the gap was between the trees. That lack of space, along with Concours77 pointing out the post in the ditch, is moving the solution along.
Sylvia apparently thought my statements conflicted when I said it was obvious the CAB was wrong but I had no target solution in mind. There's no conflict there. It is becoming clearer to several here that the CAB was wrong, soften the word however you like. And I still don't know what happened and am ready to give up any holding that has evidence to disprove it.