- If you don't give any further precision, as it is the case here, it most often means that the end-point is included
- Thus, I certainly understand the BEA report as saying that all position reports were sent from the a/c nominal route, up to and including the last message at 0210 .
Yes. And the same holds in English: it is
generally assumed that the final point is included if it has not been specified one way or the other. So those that want to lambast the BEA for 'lying about the deviation' have convention on their side in both languages.
But note that this is only convention, and possibly that paragraph was originally written by some math professor who is used to thinking in terms of excluded endpoints (mathematically it is often common to specify a range as including the initial value and NOT including the final value). So the person writing it might not realize that it is ambiguous.
I think more likely though, from the very sketchy coverage of almost everything in the report, that we should consider this to be a
preliminary report, and that the BEA did not have all of its ducks in a row when it wrote it; indeed, they didn't even have a count of how many ducks they had to line up. There are other places in the report where there is bad grammar in both French and English, and the best explanation for the bad grammar was that the sentence was changed at the last minute, probably after the report had already been translated.