Monday, August 8, 2011

AF447 again and again?

AF447 will undoubtedly reoccur again and again because the aircraft mishap investigation board failed to discover the cause of the mishap and instead blamed the mishap on the crew. Not only is this an inaccurate and unsubstantiated conclusion, it is also a conclusion that is misinformative. No airline reading this report will be able to use the report to take steps to prevent a similar mishap from occurring again. That is a very large error on the part of the company and the country.

The sole and critically important purpose of an aircraft mishap safety investigation is to determine the cause of the mishap. Period. By accurately determining the cause of the mishap, the safety investigation informs all of us on how to prevent this mishap from occurring again.

Instead, the board doing the investigation has chosen to take their license to do a safety investigation and use the investigation as a legal tool to attempt to lay legal blame for the mishap on flight crew. This is a total aberration of the legitimacy of the entire process of safety investigations.

While companies and countries have the right to do a legal investigation to protect their legal interests, it is not their place to take the safety investigation and abscond with it for their own legal purposes. The public deserves and the industry deserves an unbiased safety mishap investigation.
What has been publish so far is not that at all.

This is a terrible miscarriage of safety and a great example of why the fox should not be guarding the hen house.