6. Eye witnesses are notoriously unreliable and are best ignored.
Most of us who've been involeved in Accident Investigation would rephrase that..
6. Eye witnesses
can be notoriously unreliable
and their reports should be weighed carefully before being totally discounted or ignored
- many have made serious mistakes ignoring such evidence on petty prejudices
So, sometimes they are and sometimes they aren't... the one I quoted in #133 certainly seemed to have noticed that the aircraft crashed - or was he unreliable about that?
We shall see if his estimate of the initially nose-up attitude and approx height (80m) was far wrong fairly soon I should think....
The evidence in the field seems to support his statement '...
the aircraft seemed then to lose speed (& propulsion?) and drop very steeply'
It's a starting point and without CVR's and FDR' etc, just like a detective, have to build up a picture from visual evidence... fortunately we have additional information these days
.