Never having been involved with the AAIB or its Dutch equivalent (fortunately; knock on wood) my guess would be that the most valuable person to the AAIB would be a project manager with expertise in investigations (maybe ex-police), a reasonable grasp of aviation (but not necessarily extended experience in one branch while neglecting the other branches) but most of all the expertise of working in a highly politicized environment, where lots of stakeholders will want the report to sway a certain way.
As far as specific aviation expertise is concerned (ops or engineering), well, you can always hire these experts as and when required. Although it helps if the AAIB has reasonably experienced people within their own ranks to backstop the outside experts, and call bull!!!!! when they see it.
But above all, you need to be fiercely independent. No axes to grind, no favors to return. In that respect a background in aviation may actually be a hindrance.
One other problem I see with the AAIB sourcing people from the aviation community, now that I think about it, is that a lot of jobs within aviation are task-oriented. For a mechanic, as soon as the plane leave the hangar and the paperwork is done, the job is finished. For a pilot, as soon as the shutdown checklist is completed, the job is finished. Not a lot of people in aviation who have long-term (months) projects, and it's even rarer to take your work home. AAIB investigations sometimes take a year or longer and may become very emotional at times. They also involve lots of paperwork that all needs to be read, analyzed, summarized, digested, valued and incorporated into a final report. And an AAIB employee might be involved in half a dozen, maybe more, of these investigations simultaneously. It's a completely different mindset.
Last edited by BackPacker; 29th November 2008 at 14:35.