Originally Posted by
Mikehotel152
As a former lawyer but now airline captain, I feel uncomfortable that so far we have only been given carefully selected 'facts' by the investigating authorities, sometimes in a strangely arse-about-face manner - I refer to alleged encouragement by the co-pilot to get the Captain to take an in-flight toilet break which is highly relevant to the notion of premeditation but wasn't mentioned by the investigators until the last couple of days. Is this slow release of information a case of confirmation bias?
I don't think that is quite fair on the procureur. If he had said without quoting the CVR that First Officer had deliberately flown the aircraft into the ground. He would have been howled down by everyone including you. So he had to provide a level of corroborative evidence from the CVR which I believe he did reluctantly. He was
still howled down not least by people on this site. So he provided
more information from the CVR to make it plain what had happened. (This is actually my experience of the legal / police systems in Europe they
always have more corroborative evidence but show the minimum necessary.) So as you state the information came out apparently in the 'wrong order'. This is not confirmation bias it is the way that it is done when someone only wants to provide sufficient information to make their case. As it is in this thread here are many who would have preferred the CVR to be kept confidential for 18 months or so while BEA carry out their investigation. This would have left the captain (or his family) and Airbus hung out to dry by all the people claiming that it was an aircraft fault or poor maintenance.
From my point of view the procureur has followed his procedures in an exemplary fashion. It may not be the way other countries would have done it but I suspect had the crash been of a US airliner into the Rockies the FBI would have followed very much the same path.