Preserving the Aircraft Wreckage
sure no one tampers with it. The Board investigator inspects, documents, and photographs the wreck.
sure no one tampers with it. The Board investigator inspects, documents, and photographs the wreck.Corey Lidle's wife and Tyler Stanger's family are suing Cirrus Design, alleging that a problem with the plane's flight controls caused Lidle and Stanger's plane to crash into a Manhattan hi-rise.
Miles O'Brien, a former CNN correspondent, calls the lawsuit frivolous, because the NTSB concluded the cause was pilot error. According to O'Brien, "in our litigious society, the facts don't matter for much."
O'Brien is missing the fact that the NTSB's conclusion is marred by a built-in conflict of interest. That’s because the NTSB allowed Cirrus to participate in the investigation, but not the families or the families’ experts. Is it any surprise that the NTSB’s final conclusions favored the manufacturer?
There is a known problem with the Cirrus ailerons jamming at full deflection. After this accident, Cirrus published a number of service bulletins in an attempt to correct the problem and, ultimately, the FAA issued an Airworthiness Directive against the aircraft. That doesn't necessarily mean that the aileron problem caused the Lidle crash. But the families are entitled to use the power of subpoena that comes with filing a lawsuit to investigate what happened. They don’t have to simply accept the NTSB’s conclusion — a conclusion the NTSB reached after closed-door meetings with Cirrus’ experts.
The National Transportation Safety Board doesn't have the engineering expertise or financial resources to investigate an accident on its own. So it asks industry representatives for help. In almost every case, it turns to the manufacturer of the aircraft component that failed or malfunctioned. In other words, the NSTB asks the entity most likely to have caused the crash for
help investigating it. The NTSB calls this method of investigation the "party system."
Can we really expect a manufacturer to point out to the NTSB evidence suggesting that it may have been at fault? Of course not. Asking industry representatives to help determine the cause of an accident is like asking the fox to help figure out what happened to the chickens.
Victims' families are not allowed to participate in the NTSB's accident investigations. Nor are experts hired by the families or by the families' attorneys. So the investigation is necessarily one-sided, with the NTSB's final report heavily "influenced" by the very corporations whose products or services are being investigated. The NTSB has recognized the conflict of interest inherent in its "party system" but, unfortunately for victims and their families, continues the practice in just about all of its investigations.
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