THE GREATEST problem of aircraft-accident investigation is not the disappearance of the evidence into a Florida swamp or the unreadability of data-recorder tapes. It is the demand by the mass media and its customers for instant answers, and the temptation of those on the periphery of the investigation to give them.
The general public has become used to instant answers, and to seeing things in real time, through television. The Gulf War provided the classic example of a major conflict which the general public could watch on its screens as it happened. For a public which has grown used to such instant coverage - which can reduce major, traumatic events to the status of a football match - the need for painstaking, cautious investigation of something like an aircraft crash is becoming a quite alien concept. The case for cautious investigation is, of course, not helped in the public's eyes by the fact that the finally established cause (or, more usually, series of causes) for an accident can often be identified as a possible or even probable cause quite early on in the investigation.
This is creating obvious problems for investigators and regulators, most clearly in countries which have the most advanced mass media. The USA is right at the top of that list, as the treatment of the recent loss of a ValuJet McDonnell Douglas DC-9 in Florida shows. Alas, it follows closely the experience of the Pittsburgh crash of a USAir Boeing 737 and the crash near Chicago of an American Eagle ATR-72 later in 1994.
In all these cases - and worst in this latest one - a string of wildly differing theories, each of them changing day by day, has been or is being presented to the media and its public by a variety of different people from different organisations. Some of those people may, indeed, be following very carefully the self-imposed rule of accident investigation: that all that is released during an investigation will be released by the official accident-investigation team, and that they will only release that which they have established as fact.
It is clear, however, that many of the people making pronouncements about the ValuJet crash are not making those pronouncements on the basis of established, incontrovertible fact, but on the basis of theory, speculation and half-fact. Alas, in these days of non-specialisation within the mass media, those who receive these messages from so-called experts have no way of distinguishing between theory, speculation and legitimate verdict, nor of knowing who is in a position to deliver those differing messages.
If that was a problem only for the media and its relations with investigators and regulators, that would be fine. The real worry is that this is becoming a problem too for everybody else affected by the crash - victims, relatives, operators and manufacturers.
It is the professional duty of investigators, and of regulators or politicians who might at some stage have to act on the results of the investigation, to reduce the confusion to a minimum. They can do that best by confining themselves to speaking (if, indeed, they must speak at all) only on subjects of which they have genuine, factual knowledge. In most cases, the only group of professionals who can have any real knowledge of what has been found is the team of investigators on the case. They should not be pressured - either from within or from without their own organisations - to disclose evidence or discuss its relevance during the investigation. They are there to investigate, and the greatest service that anybody else in the industry can do is to let them get on with investigating.
If there are findings which those investigators feel should be shared with the aviation community or others before the release of the final investigation report, they will undoubtedly release them so that the relevant authority can act. Until then, others should follow their example and keep their counsel. There is no place in accident investigation for the half-fact or the half-baked opinion.
Source: Flight International
