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?
Any chance of avoiding the conspiracy theories here? There's barely a country in the western world that produces civil airliners that hasn't learned the hard way about political/business meddling with safety concerns. We had it in the '50s when BOAC was allowed to continue Comet services despite the metal fatigue problem being neither discovered nor fixed. The Yanks had it in the '70s with the infamous "Midnight Gentlemen's Agreement" between the head of McDonnell-Douglas and the FAA. And finally our Gallic cousins had a similar controversy in the '80s over the Habsheim accident (though I suspect the remaining controversy over that one has a very different motivation than that put forward by the Airbus-bashers, not that I could ever prove it).
In every case, the system was embarrassed in public and forced to play by the rules in future. The BEA are no different - when the Air Inter A320 crashed on Mont St. Odile they made sure that they brought the NTSB in as an impartial party. IMO they've learned their lesson - give them a chance.