I've said that it felt like the Lockheed engineers thought the CAB investigators were a bunch of fools. One basis for that is that Lockheed drew a line on the map showing what they considered the only possible flight path, and the CAB guys added a huge sweeping possibility space to that. The CAB space includes an area where the plane would have to get into a LEFT bank to get to the impact site.
What the report actually says is: "Lockheed Aircraft Corporation, in response to the Board's request, provided
a study of the flightpath based both on L-188 performance data and information disclosed during the investigation. Their study
encompassed a ground envelope of reported flightpaths but, based on performance data, the inner boundary was considered as the only possible flghtpath. Based on the Lockheed study, Board investigators prepared the estimated flghtpath chart."
In other words, the chart shows the entire ground envelope provided by Lockheed, based on different data sets, even though they considered the "inner boundary" to be the only possible one. How on earth could the CAB have shown what was meant by the "inner boundary" without also showing the entire envelope from Lockheed's study? They didn't just willy-nilly add some "possibility space".
Discovering a letter from Don Nyrop (NWA pres) saying they were highly skeptical of the CAB report and pointed out 22 errors is another and unexpected piece of evidence.
Well, Northwest was being sued by passengers, or facing paying out judgments, so it would be in their best interests to try to shake the CAB's findings of negligence. However, based on the court documents I've been able to find, it appears all the passengers received settlements, so it certainly appears the evidence presented to the courts substantiated the CAB's findings. The court documents also note many of the same witnesses who testified in the CAB hearing testified in the civil trials, which tends to bolster rather than refute the CAB's findings.
I have little trouble imagining they thought up the crash scenario and just interpolated the power line angle. Maybe they did more than that and we don't have the data. But pulling the number out of the air would match other clues.
Really? And which "clues" indicate they pulled other numbers "out of the air."
"...it felt like" and "imagining" are well beyond conjecture based on evidence, and right into pulling theories out of the air.