A couple of interesting articles re: Air France Flt 447. "Crash investigator likes to blame pilots"

[A HERETIC I AM]

I enjoy using the web surfing application Stumble as it is customizable to my interests. One is aviation. I found this article which mentions Mr. Paul-Louis Arslanian, a French crash investigator who has his detractors amongst the 38,200 member European Cockpit Association.

That Business Insider article quotes this Bloomberg piece which suggests "Arslanian has his detractors. The French branch of the European Cockpit Association, which has 38,100 members, says he favors conclusions that protect manufacturers such as Toulouse, France-based Airbus at the expense of pilots."

To be fair to Mr. Arslanian, he also has his champions, among them Jim Hall, a former U.S. National Transportation Safety Board chairman who investigated the deadly crash of a French- built ATR 72 in Indiana with Arslanian in 1994 and worked with him on the Concorde examination.

"There can't be a better person than Paul to lead this" he said.

Another fact I found interesting; (quoting the Bloomberg article) "the example of the South African Airways Boeing Co. 747 that crashed in the Indian Ocean in 1987. A deep- water recovery team found the voice recorder in 16,000 feet of water more than a year later, long after the pingers stopped working. The evidence suggested a fire was to blame." (bold emphasis mine)

The conclusion I reach reading these two articles is that while Mr. Arslanian might very well be competent and experienced, European pilots really want the black boxes to be found so that Mr. Arslanian's accident inquiry does not blame the pilots unfairly.

I do not envy the task the crash investigators and recovery teams have in this incident. They have an enormous amount of work still ahead of them.

[ProgressiveProfessor]

1. Its always the PIC's fault unless strongly proved other wise

(PIC = Pilot In Command).

Always been that way.