Originally Posted by
PDR1
I have to disagree. The AAIB investigation simply collects facts and looks for causes. The facts are unbiased and available to all. Any and all facts accumulated by the AAIB investigation should be available to the police, the CPS and the defence should it be deemed that a crime may have taken place. You can't simply say that as certain facts were established by the AAIB they must be excluded from any criminal investigation - that's unreasonable, and verging on a "pilots covering up for other pilots" position.
PDR
Not quite what I said.
The AAIB report is available to the police, CPS - or anybody else. That report of facts is, formally, only prepared to allow recommendations to be made, and support them. Hence that AAIB reports where they consider there to be no useful recommendations to be made, tend to be pretty minimal.
The rest of it can be made available, where due process shows that it should be released. It's not automatically available. I imagine that there's also due process somewhere if the AAIB want access to things the police have - and equally rightly so.
Making all of the evidence automatically available would be rather calculated to stop pilots being open with the AAIB. Given that it's in most of our minds more important to prevent future accidents than prosecute pilots who have made mistakes - that shouldn't be encouraged.
G