Originally Posted by
Lyman
I would not have entered the thread if France had upheld the verdict. Their reasons, I assume, have to do with a lack of compelling evidence in the public domain such that a standard of proof is unmet.
It was more to do with the fact that the opinion of the judge who oversaw the appeal differed from that of the judge who oversaw the original case.
As such, the BEA document is thready, and missing some important work that imo should be present in a criminal prosecution.
Have you read it thoroughly? It's a weighty document and I haven't covered all of its contents but it's about as thorough as one could hope it to be.
The BEA report is not intended to be (nor was it ever or should it be) a basis for criminal prosecution, it is simply a collection of facts and evidence (including the detail that - contrary to your earlier assertions - AF stopped using retread tyres since January 1996, BA having done the same since 1981) from which conclusions are drawn about the circumstances surrounding the accident. The document itself covers every aspect of the evidence and the accident sequence without assigning responsibility on the part of any of the parties involved.
The judges in the case had access to it simply as one piece of evidence, and the decisions regarding prosecution hinge on the representations made by the legal representatives of the involved parties - not the report.
As an example, then, BEA failed to provide irrefutable evidence that the Titanium strip destroyed the tyre(#2).
Incorrect - they (and others) used every technology available to them to assess the probability of the strip being the initiator of the destruction of the tyre, a process which was neither simple nor cheap (see report sections 1.16.5-1.16.5.4).
Their conclusion was that based on the probability of all the scenarios, the scenario whereby the strip contact was the initiator of the tyre's destruction made the most sense. They could not, and did not say any more than that.
As you correctly assert, the content of the report was not sufficient to prosecute on its own - and it was not intended to be. At the risk of repeating myself,
the decision to prosecute was made by the judge based on the representations made by the legal teams of the parties concerned.
To make it as crystal-clear as I can, this and other BEA reports (like those of the AAIB) are never written with the intent of being used as prosecutorial aids. They tend to be very dry and scientific in nature (unlike those of the NTSB, which tend to be more forthright on assigning responsibility) and anyone who believes that the BEA has any say in the legal outcome of cases involving accidents is labouring under a significant misapprehension. The outcome of such cases is purely in the hands of the lawyers.