Originally Posted by
Dick Smith
What is going on?
Parylisis by analysis. I spend a large portion of my day determining the root cause of mechanical failures, there’s 2 stages - a tear down report which shows what the component looks like when it is disassembled followed by a detailed failure analysis a week or 2 later. Rarely does the failure analysis come up with any epiphanies that weren’t evident from the tear down report. We don’t often find new ways of breaking things, we just repeat the old methods over & over.
My point is the ATSB spend years developing a report which mostly mirrors what professional pilots/engineers suspected was the root cause all along. They have to get it right & people don’t always tell the truth so evidence & accuracy is more important than a timeline but the current timelines aren’t reasonable. I’ve been involved in 1 investigation through the ATSB which had all people on board including the pilot tell the same story, & yet it took 2 years for the Report to be released, & when it was released it summarised exactly what the pilot said on day 1. I’m sure that file spent most of its time sitting around on a desk somewhere.
Maybe we should set a 2 day timeline, whatever the consensus is on pprune after after 2 days is the root cause.
