Originally Posted by snanceki
What is surprising to me is the FACT that the AAIB have failed to issue an updated statement for some time now.
You shouldn't be surprised. It is standard procedure. ICAO conventions require a preliminary report within 30 days and a final report, and that is what most accident investigation agencies do, AAIB included. It is very rare for any information to be made public in between, except when safety issues are identified in the course of an investigation, in which case safety recommendations dealing with these issues may be issued.
There are very good reasons for this. If you publicise what you are *thinking about*, then all those people and organisations who feel they might be disadvantaged by your potential conclusions will activate their lobbying machines to try to get your ideas changed. This happened most notoriously during the AA587 investigation, and prompted a public reprimand to the involved parties from the NSTB Chairman.
Originally Posted by snanceki
This suggests that they really don't know what happened or alternatively they do but consider the chances of a repeat event to be EXTREMELY low.
This suggests only that the AAIB are holding to their normal procedures during investigations.
BTW, trying to come up with a list of all possibilities and reasoning about them is a very good exercise. It is one of the skills that I try to encourage students to develop in my course on causal explanation. It is a skill that requires considerable experience and practice, as well as apparently (dare one say it) a certain amount of analytical talent. (In mathematical terms, one would speak of devising a *partition of the space* of possibilities, "space" here meaning simply "set".) The main trick is not only to make sure you have included everything, but also to learn to apply some self-checks to see if you indeed have everything. The trick which comes a close second is to devise a partition that is explanatorily fruitful, that is, in which each category leads you down some relatively narrow set of possibilities. The third trick is to know when you don't have enough information to be able effectively to apply tricks 1 and 2.
I don't know how you judge the likelihood of your three "likely causes", but I think it is obvious to both you and me that this is by no means a complete enumeration of the possibilities at any level of generality. So I am not sure how it helps anyone.
PBL