Originally Posted by
BRDuBois
Which comes back to the final wreckage being tail-first and inverted, the discomfiting fact that started me on this project. The CAB investigators decided on the day of the crash that the plane slid tail first and right side up. They never corrected it through the final report. What sort of focus and determination does it take to accomplish that?
I think I have accounted for a mechanism by which that can happen in an earlier post. Did the engineers sit down and bother to work out how many Joules of precession energy were contained in the massive propellers spinning several hundred rpm? The answer is that they didn't because it wasn't relevant to how the accident happened in the first place. They instinctively knew that there would be enough energy to rotate the rear fuselage and left wing by 90° so it fell to the ground in a level attitude. The propellers had enough energy to rip the wings apart in two earlier whirl mode crashes. Undoubtably there would have been energy estimates in the earlier whirl mode crash reports that could have been consulted if necessary.
It all comes down to whether the final disposition of the tail section had any relevance to the accident and I can't see that it does. Why add additional complication to the report when it isn't necessary? Remember, all of this information was being manually transcribed and typed up. No computers or word processors to do a quick cut and paste edit. Every page had to be typed with carbon paper or a stencil to produce multiple copies for distribution. Speaking from personal experience, you take whatever shortcuts you can and avoid correcting errors that do not affect the final conclusion, when every typing error means going back to the beginning of a page and starting again from scratch.