Originally Posted by
megan
It wasn't slapdash treatment, it just wasn't pertinent to the accident. You see the same in today's accident reports. Investigators are under the pump to find the root cause and to get the message out. Wasting time on non pertinent issues delays that process.
I have no quarrel with their finding of the root cause. But their work on the impact sequence does not magically become rigorous and proper just because they got the root cause right. The work on the impact sequence was still slapdash and it's fair to call it that.
Today based on a tip from a reader I went to the Chicago Tribune archives. On the back of the Monday edition there was an artist's conception of the impact sequence. It shows the main body sliding backwards to the final site. The paper didn't make this up; it had to come from the CAB.
As an old newspaperman I can tell you that the morning edition is put to bed about 11pm. In other words, on the day of the crash the CAB had ALREADY decided that the plane slid backwards, and they never wavered from that. This goes beyond unconscionable, which is what I called it in my analysis. To put out any affirmative statement on Day One is unheard of.
At the time the CAB put their stake in the ground on the backward slide, they had absolutely no idea what the root cause was.