Yup!
Check out the AF447 thread! Very few facts, just pages and pages of wild speculation, all done in the name of finding an answer to the burning question of what happened, without enough facts to work with do that.
Here we have been told that the report should be out fairly soon so that waiting a bit seems like the way to go, to me anyway.
The event itself doesn't seem to present much of a puzzle given the basic facts we (think we) know. The stuff we need to understand the event better is going to be in that report, such as the exact ATC clearance given, how events were understood and reacted to by the crew as shown by the FDR and CVR, etcetera.
I am sure that we all have our personal opinions about this accident and you could plot them along a line from no blame attached to the crew to all the blame attached to the crew, when the (arguable and relative) truth must be somewhere along that line but not at either end. That isn't what matters from the point of view of improving safety, though. For that we need to identify the causes of the accident so that we need the report itself.
Almost all of us know to relax back pressure when the stick shaker actuates or to put in TOGA power when the airspeed is sagging. We don't need to bloviate at length here to show that, really. What we don't know is simply why these accident crewmen missed what "everyone else knows."
It is like the debrief from a sim session where we made some surprising mistake, one we weren't even aware of until told about it. Yup, there it is on the print-out and the video recording, us shutting off the wrong generator, say. The only question remaining of any value then is, "Why?"
It isn't as though one always is told "You made a clumsy mistake. No one should make such a clumsy mistake." No, it is "You made a clumsy mistake because..." Here it is that "because" that we are looking for, not as much fun as pointing a finger and pontificating about the finer points of flying.
Last edited by chuks; 5th Feb 2010 at 06:48.