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Maybe this could work, moderators willing: a forum called "accident discussions", where a thread can be started with one or two posts that contain reports of the event, possibly the local news content. The thread could then be locked, until the NTSB report is released or some long time (6 months?) has passed. After that, anyone interested in discussing it could ask Doug to unlock the thread. It might still degenerate quickly... 'Tis the nature of these discussions. And it would be a significant amount of work for Doug and the Moderators to manage. But getting the discussions all in one place might make it easier, and forcing the time delay might reduce emotional responses. |
Speculation aka Deliberation
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Cheers and a hand salute to you and your service, and cheers to civility...thank you, Sir. I agree with your observation, although I firmly believe military safety boards take it beyond mere speculation. Armed with the evidence, and supported with analysis, the safety board can now deliberate the causes. Conversely, only the safety board is in a position to deliberate: Everyone outside the safety board can only speculate...and they shouldn't. Yes, the causes are not always apparent, which is why we allow stumped safety boards to use the "undeterminable/most likely due to" finding. I don't let them use that as a cop-out: They've got to do the research, and we don't spare funds for our mishap boards. However, if they've reached a stand-still on several possible causes, our safety investigation process allows the board president to declare, "The mishap fuel widget failed in the open position for an undeterminable reason, but most likely due to [this], [that], or [the other]". They must explain fully why each factor could have caused the event, and why it couldn't be ruled out. Then, each possible cause must have recommendations that would prevent it from occuring (procedures, modifications, replacement, etc). We do this to speed the investigative process while ensuring we've hopefully hit the target. I don't know NTSB rules well enough, but I don't think they have this option. About those "whacked" theories? I pay attention to them most closely. Like Iron Paul said, we're not inventing a lot of new ways to crash airplanes. However, sometimes it's the "whacked" theories that get us closest to the truth. |
I strongly disagree
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Letting others die to save an already deceased persons feeling is imnsho a bad choice. |
Try Facebook
Speculation, even after extensive investigation of the KNOWN facts, is often wrong based on who is doing the speculating.
Conversely, speculation on forums by people with very little information or knowledge of the events is even more damaging to those involved in the accident/incident. Just my opinion, YMMV. 30 Years Law Enforcement/Technical Accident investigative experience. Doesn't differ much from aircraft investigations. My Vote: Those that want to discuss accidents under investigation should do so in other forums. |
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30+ years of firefighting exposed me to hundreds of fire cause investigations, pretty much the same thing with speculation vs. factual investigation. Ever notice on the TV news they almost always state that the cause of the fire is "Under investigation". Let the pros do their job. |
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However, the parallels between technical/cave diving deaths (and there are plenty and some by well known guys with 10's of thousands of dives) are strong. When there is a death in the tech diving community we rarely if ever hear of a reason. When we do, all we get is an autopsy. Guess what, guy was 7,000 feet back in a cave, of COUSE he died by drowning. Even then it's months if ever that we get even that tidbit. Same with aviation. At least with tech diving we sometimes get the equivalent of black box data in the form of dive computer data. We never see that in our branch of aviation. It is extremely valuable in the tech and cave diving community, and cave diving is well known to be the most dangerous sport in the world, to have these discussions. It works well. Go to thedecostop.com and check it out. The forums are heavily moderated. Often the discussions turn out to be hypothetical or philosophical discussions of safety, operational factors, decision trees, preparation and so on. Very, very valuable and the rv community is missing out on a similar value by these discussions not being available on a popular forum. I'll reiterate, not having the discussion just to save the reputation or avoid hurting friends and family of an already dead guy is a poor choice. If you have that sensitive of a nature, don't go that part of the site. Problem solved. |
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Humans have been killing themselves in aircraft accidents for over 100 years now. When I look at that history, one of the observations I can make is that we only have a very small number of accidents, but we repeat them over and over again.
It's not unique to our specific sector of aviation either. I reckon paraglider pilots (for example) only have about 6 accidents. Oh look, Joe Bloggs was ridge soaring, got blown over the back, and hit a tree. There goes Jenny Biggs, launched in a cross wind with a half inflated canopy, stalled, and broke her ankle. Mike Rash over there misjudged his landing flare and faceplanted in from 20 feet. And who's the last person who got sucked into a thundercloud, spent 20 minutes being pummelled with ice blocks in IMC while his canopy shredded, and threw his reserve at the last second while regaining consciousness on the way back down? Lather, rinse, repeat, it's all just repetitions of the same thing, with very little incremental new knowledge gained from each occurrence. We see the same in our area of aviation. CFIT. Runway excursion on take off or landing. Mishandled EFATO. VFR into unintentional IMC. Clipping a power line during low-level idiocy. Probably a catalog of perhaps 20 accidents that light GA pilots have, magnified into thousands by the force of repetition. In aggregate, there's very little to learn from the most recent accident that can't also be learned from the hundreds of copies of the same accident that have occurred since the Wright Brothers' first PIO. We can convey safety messages and safety lessons without drilling down into the flying history of an identifiable community member. We can analyse the whole corpus of accidents that relate to the message we're trying to convey, and draw from aggregate patterns of behaviour instead of focussing on individuals. The messages will be the same, we'll just use names like "Many Pilots" instead of "John Smith." Is there anyone reading this who doesn't already know a myriad of ways to avoid CFIT under IMC, and who really needs to know the name, age and GPS coordinates of someone who's done it before the lesson sinks in? If there is, I respectfully submit that it isn't the VAF comment moderation policy that's the problem. - mark |
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