I sat through the seven-odd weeks of the case (apart from three days in the middle), and I have contemporaneous notes of most of the proceedings.
There were two pieces of evidence that particularly struck me, over many days of detailed offerings.
The first was from one of the ‘first responders’ who attended AH as he lay beside the wreckage of the Hunter cockpit. AH was at death’s door - indeed his life was only saved by the timely introduction of a needle into his lung. He was speaking, although not particularly coherently. But, according to the evidence of Mark Durham, AH said he had “at some point blacked out in the air”. Although this was not an actual ‘death bed statement’, it could be considered to have a similar status, since he was, effectively, about to die.
The second piece of evidence that seemed particularly significant to me, was offered by the defence ‘human factors’ expert witness, Dr Stephen Jarvis. He adduced seven, eight, or possibly even twelve, piloting errors in the 23 seconds leading up to the aircraft’s arrival at the apex of the accident manoeuvre (the bent loop). They included:
- Unexplained power reduction.
- Continuing the turn beyond the appropriate inbound track.
- Failure to notice low speed.
- Pitch oscillations.
- Incorrect roll in the vertical.
- After, the apex, the failure to eject. That would have been a rule-based action, from his training.
Dr Jarvis did not include the failure to conduct an escape manoeuvre as one of his errors, because he said that was not his area of expertise.
Also not mentioned in his evidence, but clearly visible in the cockpit GoPro camera footage, was the fact that the aircraft was lined up on the road, apparently intentionally, during its final descent. Why would any pilot in his right mind do that, unless he was under the impression that he was lining up on a runway?
Dr Jarvis pointed out that one type of accident is an accumulation errors, which are not independent. In this case he was unable to find any relationship between the errors. The chances of that happening, he said, were astronomically improbable. That makes them very difficult to explain - other than by some degree of cognitive impairment.
He was asked about the possibility of this all being due to “extremely bad piloting”. He couldn’t accept that. AH was a very experienced and expert pilot, he said. Bad piloting didn’t fit, when he made ten or more errors in 23 seconds. “He’s in front of an audience, he’s on peak performance, [and] gash, complacent behaviour doesn’t fit.”
It may be worth reminding ourselves that AH has no memory of anything from Thursday 20 August 2015 (two days before the crash) to when he came round from his induced coma, in hospital, the following week. His amnesia was medically attested to by Legalapproach in his post #132, when Legalapproach also pointed out that the prosecution had not sought to discredit the amnesia. So in all of AH’s three and a half days in the witness box, he was not able to describe at first hand anything that happened during the accident flight or its immediate preparation.
Bearing in mind that the jury (of eleven people) came to a unanimous verdict after about seven hours of consideration, it seems clear that they accepted the defence arguments over the prosecution’s. Who are we to disagree with that?
Incidentally, the reason for there being eleven jurors, rather than twelve, was that, on 29 January, one juror fell ill and was taken to hospital by ambulance. She was excused further jury service.
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