Originally Posted by
awblain
If inquiries into the causes and facts proceed before and without relevance to potential prosecutions, then I suspect there's more chance of getting to the bottom of the circumstances, and reducing the opportunities for repeats.
In France, that's exactly what the BEA are charged with. They will, as I said, take the primary evidence and secondary evidence from all parties involved and attempt to make sense of it from a purely technical and operational standpoint. Their remit, as with most civil service agencies charged with aviation incident investigation (including our AAIB), forbids them from explicitly apportioning responsibility. That is left to the criminal and civil judicial apparatus.
Investigators may testify during the legal proceedings, but their testimony is strictly limited to the content of the report.
Most of the myths that grew up around this case are a result of deliberate obfuscation on the part of legal representatives via press briefings in particular. This is why a lot of commonly understood aspects are in fact incorrect.