Guillaume Schmid of France’s SNPL union toldThe Associated Press on Friday that the lawsuit is over violating a French law on keeping information about investigations secret while they are ongoing. The lawsuit doesn’t name an alleged perpetrator, a method in French law that leaves investigators to determine who is at fault. “We can understand there is a certain pressure, a wish to know,” Schmid said — but he warned that leaking information too early can mislead the public instead of informing accurately. The French air accident investigation agency, the BEA, “will never be able to satisfy the demand for immediate information. … It is designed to resist that,” and instead is meant to focus on “establishing irrefutable facts,“ he said. European Cockpit Association also expressed concern about the leaks and urged further investigation before drawing final conclusions.
“The International Federation of Air Line Pilots’ Associations (IFALPA) deplores and condemns yesterday’s leaking of certain elements of the Cockpit Voice Recorder (CVR) of the Germanwings flight 4U9525,” the association said in a statement. “Not only do these leaks contravene the internationally agreed principles of accident investigation confidentiality set out in ICAO Annex 13, they are also a breach of trust to all those involved in the investigation and to the families of the victims.” IFALPA represents more than 100,000 pilots in more than 100 countries worldwide. IFALPA said the sole purpose of a CVR is to aid investigators in determining the factors leading to an accident and not to apportion blame or be used outside of its safety context. CVR details, it said, should only be publicly released following a thorough and complete investigation of the events that occurred, and not prematurely during the course of the field portion of the accident investigation. “Leaking premature, unanalyzed, and partial CVR recordings, which lack the context of the entire body of factual investigative data, severely interferes with the investigative process, and can only lead to early conclusions on what exactly occurred during the time leading up to the accident,” the union said. “Any other use of CVR data is not only invalid, but is an unacceptable invasion of privacy best described as a search for sensationalism and voyeurism of the worst kind. It is vital for the investigating body to ensure all information under their control is properly handled until the completion of the investigation.”
When dealing with airplane crashes, the most important information, even more important than the cockpit voice recordings, is the Flight Data Recorder (FDR) or ADR (Accident Data Recorder). The FDR records instructions sent to all electronic systems on an aircraft, including the auto-pilot and the security system for the entry to the cockpit. Whatever information might be provided by the conversation between the pilot and co-pilot in the cockpit would have to be corroborated or confirmed by the hard data from the FDR. Analyzing this data naturally takes several days or weeks, so it was surprising that, within 24 hours of the crash, the New York Times had cited an unnamed “senior French military official” as saying that one of the pilots was locked out of the cockpit by the other and that was what caused the crash… The precipitous release of this information appears to have undermined the official investigation that is being conducted by the French ‘Bureau of Enquiry and Analysis for Civil Aviation Safety’ (BEA) a civilian, not military, agency of the French government responsible for investigating aviation accidents, and established a narrative that has become the official truth of what happened to the plane – it was deliberately crashed by co-pilot Andreas Lubitz.
In terms of the way this ‘investigation’ has been handled, it bears similarities to the case of Egypt Air Flight 990. That crash was most likely the result of an anomalous weather event that proved too much for the mechanical constraints of the aircraft, but from Boeing’s point of view, a “suicide pilot” is a much more financially-appealing explanation, so they went with that and opened a criminal investigation, much to chagrin of the Egyptian authorities.
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