When accidents happen the law has rarely been breached, so justice should keep its distance until it is clear there is a case to answer
Far from receding in the face of industry campaigns to embed "just culture" aviation safety reporting systems into national laws everywhere, the tendency for governments and judicial systems to react to accidents and incidents by wielding the equivalent of political and legal baseball bats looks as if it is growing.
It is good news to hear that the six people - regulators, airline executives and Airbus's former chief engineer - against whom criminal charges were brought as a result of the Mont St Odile Airbus A320 crash in January 1992 have been acquitted on all counts. But nothing in the system has changed: the French judicial system actually obstructs the technical investigation into an accident, especially in the early evidence-gathering phase. And what kind of a judicial system takes 14 years to get a case like this into the courts? If there had been a case to answer, it should have been brought far sooner - the technical investigation was complete by 1994.
This was not a murder mystery in which the perpetrator had to be identified, and against whom a case for prosecution then had to be assembled. All the parties to an aviation accident are known, the circumstances surrounding the accident are contained in aircraft and air traffic control recording devices, and a forensic study of evidence is carried out in the field by technical experts. If any party to the accident has been negligent or willfully flouted procedure, it will be easy to prove after the technical and operational evidence has been assembled. So it is utterly pointless for the judicial system to rush in.
Then there are the politicians. The desire to be seen doing something - or to place the blame in another minister's department, or with the airline, or with the pilots -- after a tragedy that might involve the national aviation infrastructure, seems to be irresistible. Why the panic? The truth will emerge in due course. Meanwhile, the most useful thing politicians can do is to identify any weakness in a system over which they have influence - like air traffic control funding, for example - so as to sort it out. That is what accident investigation is about - finding inadequacies to enable them to be quickly corrected. It is not about apportioning blame. Retribution via the courts can come later if negligence seems to have been a factor.
In Brazil right now, in the wake of the mid-air collision between a Gol Boeing 737 and an Embraer Legacy wild and poorly substantiated accusations are rampant. Within 48h of the crash the judiciary was already preparing criminal charges against whoever survived it - which includes the Legacy pilots who are still being held there. This is the law of the jungle, not the law as it should be, and it impedes air safety, it does not advance it.
Source: Flight International
