Originally Posted by
wallybird7
Just for the record, the mission of EVERY investigating body, is to gather the facts and make a determination of Probable Cause and to recommend a fix, but NOT to affix blame, fault, or liability, which is left to legal venues.
Wallybird, you're right!
However, I don't see anywhere in the post you quoted where I referred to "blame". I was very careful in the word I chose, and said "finding", using the language common to the AAIB, NTSB et al.
As a pilot all I want is all the given facts and then I can make my own conclusion regarding what to do about it. In this case avoid thunderstorms at all costs. Period.
Well, glad that's all sorted then - back home, lads!
Seriously though, when they've got facts worthy of release - I suspect they'll release them. It has long been common practice in aviation accident investigation to cover as much ground as they can so that as much can be learned as possible - that's the reason it tends to take a while.
For example, the AAIB's final report on the BA038 incident took 2 years and one month to produce. In that case, they had the entire airframe more-or-less intact, both flight recorders and the QAR to hand, as well as the entire crew and passenger list available for interview - but the lack of evidence regarding icing on the heat exchangers meant that there was a significant hole in the available data and thus there was a seemingly "inexplicable" element to the incident. The BEA produced their initial interim report on AF447 with small fragments of wreckage, a set of ACARS messages and no flight recorder data. Now that they have more wreckage and the flight recorders they are probably going to have to do a lot of rewriting of their assumptions, as well as a whole battery of human factors testing in relation to what they've learned from the CVR.
As an aside, the discussion on BA038 on here went back and forth for those entire two years, and speaking for myself I learned a lot of new and surprising things from that discussion - but at no point did any contributor demand that the raw data traces were released or chide the AAIB for not doing so. Now was that because it was the AAIB doing the investigation and not the BEA? Was it because the aircraft involved was a Boeing 777 and not a member of the Airbus FBW family? Or was it because there's an understanding that these things take time and should not be rushed. Being on here for as long as I have, I suspect it was a combination of all three.
Finally, there were theories doing the rounds (that ended up in the BBC/NOVA "Lost" documentary on AF447 back in 2009) that the thunderstorm cells were obscured on radar by a smaller cell in front of the cell they entered - what do you do in that situation if avoidance beomes impossible?
when in fact they won’t even allow pilots to practise “hand flying” in the simulator at altitude, let alone in the airplane.
I haven't seen any evidence of this regarding Air France, could you point me in the direction of some?
Originally Posted by
jcjeant
Just a tought
They have this chance .. but they already begin to ruined it by the release of their last note.
And this chance was again badly wounded by the statement of a member of the french political body (Mr Mariani directly involved in the following of AF447 cause his position in the government)
"Badly wounded" how? They released all the information they could determine after
just a few days looking at the data - just as the AAIB did with BA038. M. Mariani may or may not have been speaking with the blessing of the BEA (it wouldn't be the first time politicians have gone over the heads of their accident investigators - and it's certainly not something peculiar to France).
The problem is that there are some on here that remain wedded to the idea that the BEA will always try to find against the pilot before anything else - something that is not supported by any evidence gathered over the last 20 years at least. Yes, their paycheques are ultimately signed by an entity that has a controlling stake in the manufacturer and airline involved, but the same was true to some degree of the old UK AIB (in the days when the UK made airframes and BA was state-owned), as well as the NTSB prior to the mid '70s (Boeing/McD-Douglas and Lockheed were privately owned, but heavily dependent on government/military contracts).