Originally Posted by
JD-EE
I would invite you to make a case for any of the other involved people making the release with precisely the data given and no other data. It looks like the data benefits AirBus, is neutral to or damages Air France, and smears the pilots' reputations. It might have been the French government. Blaming the pilots gets them off a financial hook to some degree. Who else benefits?
JD-EE
Honestly I don't know the motivation behind it.
It could simply be that they wanted to give some upfront information to the public as the interest in the causes of this accident were disproportionally high. Much higher than in any previous accident that I'm aware of.
In other accidents of comparable public interest (e.g. Concorde) a general picture about the reason transpired pretty early. So there was no need for the investigating agencies to leak anything, it was clear from the videos what roughly happened.
This case was different. It was pretty much a complete mystery for almost 2 years so the impatience for a 'rough picture' was extremely high and couldn't be satisfied by information available in the public domain.
(For that matter the first information about a bomb explosion in the Lockerbie crash was also published quite early, before the preliminiary report IIRC)
On the other hand it could indeed be that Airbus had an interest in getting information which indicates that the Aircraft was not the main culprit to the public and asked them a favor. I would not rule that out completely although I don't know what their real motivation was.
My only comment to this is that also in the second case I assume BEA would only do them this favor if they are sure that the final result will not deviate too much fron this preliminary picture.
Common guys and girls, they are Accident Investigators. This kind of people tend to do it with a passion. Otherwise you would look for a job where you earn easy money without having to deal with melted metal and burnt corpses, going through thousands of meticulous details on a regular basis.