On Tuesday, June 26, 2012 3:03:57 PM UTC-7, S. Murry wrote:
Hi, Ramy (and others),

I don't want to hijack the "Wide-Ranging Safety Discussion" thread, so I'm
starting a new one.

In the other thread, Ramy mentioned "rather than the all so lame reaction
of 'waiting for the NTSB report'".

I'm going to ask if you've ever been party to an NTSB investigation
before? In case you're not familiar with this term "party to" in this
context has a specific meaning whereby the NTSB invites various technical
experts to be involved with an investigation. These people are not NTSB
employees and must consent to keep confidential the information that they
learn until the NTSB completes its investigation.

Thanks to the "Texas tragedy" I and a few others in our club are parties
to this investigation. I take strong issue with the assertion that
abiding by our agreement with the NTSB is "lame." It is in fact a
pre-condition for being allowed to lend our insight to the investigation,
and I think and hope that this insight will produce a more informed
conclusion than might be the case with an investigation conducted without
the benefit of people who actually know about soaring. For this reason I
think it is in the best interests of all of us to allow some of our fellow
pilots to be parties to these investigations, but in order to do this we
have to agree to confidentiality.

I assume that you're not familiar with this process (I wasn't either,
until Sunday, June 17), so that's why I bring it up. You can gripe all
you want about whether this process is to your liking, but once we agreed
to abide by the NTSB's terms, it is not "lame" to honor this agreement.

On another level, however, I must say that before this investigation I
tended to agree with what I believe to be the opinion of many in this
forum. I used to think that if only I knew all the information that the
investigators know, with my stunningly deep knowledge of all things
aviation, I surely could accurately determine the true cause of an
accident in minutes, much faster than these government bureaucrats who
haven't flown anything besides a desk in decades.

Being involved with this investigation has changed my opinion. I will
grant you that some accidents are probably more "cut and dried" than
others, and some causes probably can be determined rather quickly.

However, not all can. With the confusion and raw emotion that was present
in the immediate aftermath of the accident, I heard a number of
conflicting eyewitness reports, saw seemingly inconsistent physical
evidence from the crash scene, and experienced other factors that made
drawing any concrete conclusions very unlikely to be correct.

And it's precisely the accidents that don't have an obvious cause that
hold the most potential for learning. After all, how much more will we
learn from a "low energy, attempting to stretch the glide, stall-spin
accident" or a "hit a fence during off-field landing" type accident.
We've all heard of these before, and I think we've already learned these
lessons (at least to the extent that you can learn from other's
misfortunes). But accidents that have unique aspects hold more potential
for learning, but also have more potential for mis-interpretation, and
therefore require even more reticence in our speculation.

I have strong respect for the NTSB investigator in charge. Although I've
only met him on June 17, he strikes me as a sharp guy, and a
professional. Maybe not an expert in soaring, but he immediately asked
for help from some of us in order to improve his ability to analyze the
facts. I sure hope nobody on this forum has to meet one of these guys "in
action" (since this would mean someone close to you has probably died),
but if you ever do have to get to know them, I suspect you will have a
better opinion of them than you might just reading the year-old (or more)
accident reports.

Until ALL the evidence has been collected, analyzed, and double-checked it
is not possible to determine a true cause for an accident. It is not
"lame" to allow this process to run its course.

I have no problem with members of the forum speculating about the possible
accident causes. Dreaming up possible scenarios and running through how
we might deal with them is a good training exercise. So, by all means,
continue the discussion, but please avoid characterizing waiting for all
the facts to be in before drawing a conclusion about any particular
accident as "lame."

--
Stefan Murry

Stephen, points well taken. My comment about it being "lame" was not directed specificaly to you. In the majority of cases I am aware of, those who claim we need to wait for the NTSB report has nothing to do with the investigation. In many investigations, the NTSB does not bother to solicit input from those who can help, and can't even get the facts right. It really all depends on the profile of the accident. This one is a high profile so it gets the right attention. I very much appreciate you share this with us so we understand the reasons for keeping it quiet for now. I can only imagine the difficult job you have in hand and the emotional magnitude of this tragedy and my heart goes to you and all those impacted.

Ramy