Originally Posted by
Pittsextra
4-5 months to engage with parties that have likely already been involved in the process that generated the draft..
I doubt in this case minor factual inaccuracies will make a hill of beans difference to the reasons for the crash or the people who have been most affected by the events
I really think you should familiarise yourself with ICAO annex 13 before launching these criticisms of the AAIB. The annex requires the reporter to allow at least 60 days for comments to come back. It can't really do much until all comments have been received since it is quite likely that the comments will be conflicting. Only after 60 days can it start to evaluate the comments to see whether they should be incorporated into the report or merely included as an appendix (ie "we received this comment, but decided not to modify the report as a consequence").
Although the report does not aim to apportion blame, it is often inevitable that blame becomes apparent from the report and so the fine detail of the wording is often argued over by the various interested parties (who of course are trying to protect their own arses). It is therefore not hard to see how another 60 to 90 days might pass before the report is ready for publication.
I have participated in an accident report (serious, though fortunately not fatal) - as an advisor and fortunately not as one being investigated - and this whole process does take a long time. In my case it was a foreign Board but I am sure it's the same the world over including UK.
Once the final report is published it's pretty hard to backtrack on a point or make a correction and so a lot of time is spent making sure that not only has the Board evaluated the accident correctly, but also that they have communicated their findings unambiguously - that latter part is no trivial task.