Mull
"If it had developed an unserviceability, a competent and careful pilot, mindful of crew and passengers not to mention self, could have and should have remained VFR and returned to base."
About 600 parts have been recovered from the Airbus A330-200 which was lost off the coast of Brazil on 1 June. There is no evidence yet that the Airbus was unserviceable [though the ACARS comms system sent 24 error messages] in the 4 mins before loss of contact].
Should BEA, the French accident investigators investigators, conclude that the pilots of the Airbus were to blame on the basis that there's no evidence the aircraft was unserviceable?
In reality the BEA is not making any assumptions because they don't have the CVR and FDR. It is a pity the MoD and the RAF, when it comes to the crash of ZD576, have no such sensitivities.
When two 757s crashed in 1996 the investigators worked backwards from the black boxes and found that tiny problems had set off a chain of events which caused the loss of about 400 lives.
Without the black boxes it's unlikely they would found the probable causes.
Should the BEA, in the absence of black boxes, make assumptions that everything was working on the Airbus and that the pilots should have landed safely if they had "developed an unserviceability"?