George’s Point of View

On this blog here, we are in the practice of posting quick news as we find it–the who, what, where, when, why of it all. Details are compressed so that we can present that quick notification of what just happened; and frequently, even the (minimum of two) news sources behind our reports do not agree.

Technically, the reality of any event could be compressed into such a quick format, because there is an ultimate truth which exists. But, it takes years for investigators to get to that ultimate truth. And when it does happen, the “why” is not going to be a single line or paragraph. It is going to be composed of hundreds of pages of documentation of all the facts that are revealed in the course of investigation.

Investigation is a painstaking process at best even if the accidents occur with witnesses and are recorded on video tape and multiple media perspectives such as the the black boxes. (And many times those records do not exist or are lost.) The investigative teams look at the obvious records, and then they go through the wreckage with a fine-toothed comb, examining concrete evidence, and use this evidence to put together the most accurate reconstruction of events possible. And frequently there are opposing perspectives of how something happened. Sometimes of the actual facts of the incident, only a partial percentage of concrete evidence is found; and sometimes it takes months or years to surface. When a new piece of evidence does surface, the entire conclusion may end up revised. (Think of the of the Titanic disaster which occurred in 1912 whose initial investigation closed that same year; and whose rediscovery in 1985, lead to a reinvestigation which actually begun in 1994, and salvage beginning in 1995.) Thus the investigative process can take an indeterminate length of time.

So we do apologize to our readers for putting anything at all in the “why” area of our records, because we well know that the why and how of what happened is simply not going to be concluded for a long, long time. We hope that it is understood that our presentation of the “why” is a cursory summary at best, but that the final conclusion that will be years in coming is the result of conscientious, painstaking, scrupulous investigation by seasoned experts.