Going Round Buoys
JP,
Congratulations on yet another disingenuous response which seems to have "vanished" since I read it at 11:11 - and you accuse others of going round the bouy again! The question was not about when negligence occurred (on the basis that your opinion is that it did) but how you can meet the requirements of no doubt whatsoever when even the senior RO admits to a degree of speculation. This question never gets answered except by the independent Inquiries who consistently, and at the highest of legal levels, say that the RAF's finding was wrong. Just to remind you, and any others who could be "taken in" by your response, this is what the Lords Inquiry said about the Reviewing Officers' Hypothses:
No direct reference to the standard of proof
Neither Reviewing Officer referred to directly to the standard of proof (absolutely no doubt whatsoever) at paragraph 9 of Annex G to AP3207. The AOC stated he was:
“…aware of the difficulty of attributing negligence to deceased aircrew,”
However, nothing in his remarks indicated that the difficulty he was alluding to was the satisfaction of a extremely high standard of proof. He could equally well have been referring to sensitivity or embarrassment in making such a finding. If “difficulty” in this was intended to refer to the standard of proof, it was an astonishingly understated way of dealing with such a crucial test. Perhaps this cursory treatment indicates that the AOC had not been properly advised as to the significance of the test.
The AOC-in-C, in his subsequent remarks, made no mention at all of any “difficulty” or of the standard of proof.
Neither Reviewing Officer appeared to justify his opinion that the deceased pilots were grossly negligent by reference to any statutory standard of proof.
and later:
Conclusion
The hypothesis recorded by the Reviewing Officers and repeated by the Chiefs of Staff was not well founded in fact and did not therefore meet the statutory criterion for a finding of negligence. Sufficient doubt existed for the initial Board to quite properly decline to make a finding of negligence. Neither Reviewing Officer nor any higher authority justified the substitution of their opinion that a finding of negligence was appropriate on the basis of assumptions derived from the same, very limited evidence available to the Board. Additional doubt was later cast on some of the assumptions by evidence not before the Board but available by September 2001.
The essential objectivity of accident investigation was incorrectly overridden, and subjective opinion was misguidedly allowed to replace the painstaking analysis of the initial Board.(my bolds)
And it is still this injustice that this thread is all about!
JB