Can I ask - for the record - does anyone here (apart from 3-Holer) believe that the crew of this flight were completely without fault in the accident?
To exonerate , meaning to absolve someone from blame for a fault or wrongdoing, may be an act of legal absolvement or an absolvement
in the light of a commonly held opinions in the minds of the laity.
So in the case of Jim Collins and the crew of TE901 who are neither in the dock nor subject to pillorying by the general public , or stoning at the hands of members of the PPRuNe fraternity for that matter, the relevance of exoneration is at best dubious. By what we can deduce of the reckoning of the unjustly maligned the late Captain Gordon Vette it seems fair to say the apportioning of blame, the question of exoneration or not, is not in any way a function of an enquiry seeking impartial and soundly based analysis and conclusions.
It is an example of the stereotypical leading question - do you think it right to exonerate the crew of this aircraft for causing this accident?