This is going to take a couple posts to reply to. Pardon while I use this one to vent.
With regard to faulting the investigators, my fault-finding is limited to their description of the flight and impact. I give them credit for finding the root cause and tracking down the people and practices that led to the failure.
I was raised in a flying family, and we all understood the vital need for accurate and objective analysis of accidents. It was something we discussed from time to time, and we were aware of my dad's views on the subject. Accident investigation is pretty close to sacred. We've all seen the lengths investigators now go to in retrieving recorders and salvaging wreckage from inaccessible locations.
When I realized that the investigators in this case had misreported as badly as they did, I was stunned. I didn't know they would do that; it was inconceivable. The actual statement is relatively innocuous - they said the plane slide tail-first and right side up to a stop. The pictures show it tail-first and upside down. By itself this is not vital data. Quite a few have told me, some with as much patience as they could muster, that this is irrelevant to the root cause, which of course I knew already.
What this factoid does do is tell us that they didn't much care about this aspect. I agree they were probably under pressure to close the case, but even so their work in this area (as reported officially) does not meet a minimal standard of care. I say 'as reported' because I cannot believe there weren't people focused on every aspect of the flight. The report implies several teams working on different areas, just as they do today. They did site surveys and debris mapping. There had to be people who understood the impact scene much better than did the person who wrote the report. But for some reason, what made it into the official report was wrong in this respect.
We can now say with confidence that the flight sequence in the report was flat out impossible. I'm reasonably sure that there was dissension at the time. Heck, they had 54 witnesses and it happened on airport grounds. There is a hint of witness disagreement, and the CAB clearly disagreed with Lockheed over the flight path. I'd love to see Lockheed materials, but they have not responded. I think any pilot, given a description of a vertical bank extended over a couple thousand horizontal feet at a height of 300 or so, would dismiss it out of hand. Correct me if I'm wrong.
The CAB report could have addressed this without negating the value of the conclusions. They could have said there was confusion about flight details, but not about what broke. Instead they drafted the cartwheel-and-backward-upright-slide scenario with perfect confidence on the afternoon of the crash and went public with it. I find this unconscionable. The ALPA report writer appears to have done even less work on it and written more purple prose.
Their handling of this phase left us with a blank space that we didn't know about. If I seem to take all this personally, it is because I was personally injured by their carelessness. They left us with a misunderstanding for 55 years. As I peel apart the layers, it's clear that there are things that friends and family would have liked to know, and it's too late.
Now that the lapse has become clear, I'm simply trying to fill in what they failed to address. My materials are very sparse, and the chances of more information turning up are virtually nil. So this project is now closer to its conclusion than its inception, but there's still something we can extract.
Knowing that the plane arrived at its final site nose-first and right side up tells us that the entire impact sequence was misrepresented. By back-calculating along the debris path, it tells us that the first impact was described wrong, and this says the flight itself was misrepresented. The flight simulator can not give precise numbers, but it's adequate to show patterns and trends. And reverse-engineering the flight seems to open up a window on what the crew was doing and thinking.
There are moments of this, I confess, which are extremely creepy for me.
So even though the investigators found the root cause, I fault them for their misreporting.