In the hours, days and weeks after a major airplane crash, the public demand for information puts NTSB investigators in a bind. How much information is appropriate for release and how much is too preliminary or too speculative to publicly broadcast? That is the very issue that the NTSB is grappling with in its press briefings and statements on the Asiana Flight 214 accident at San Francisco International Airport this past weekend. Clearly at least one organization, the US Airline Pilots Association, disagrees with how the NTSB is handling this.
Truth be told, investigators would much prefer to quietly gather the relevant data, review it privately with appropriate experts, formulate their opinions in private and then brief the public on their findings, conclusions and recommendations when they are ready. Working in the glare of the media is not easy for them. Their work gets distracted by calls for explanations of the data released and the interpretations of that data. They spend much more time than they would like on those media calls and that detracts from their investigatory duties. They particularly dislike the time they have to spend shooting down sometimes bizarre opinions from so-called experts that could be described charitably as off-the-wall.
But the NTSB is not the NSA. It does not conduct its investigations in secret. In fact, transparency is one of the NTSB’s virtues and a reason its probable cause determinations and recommendations are so well-respected around the world. On the other hand, as ALPA points out, releasing too much information prematurely can destroy reputations, invade the privacy of individuals and ultimately impede the investigatory process by making witnesses potentially less forthcoming. It’s a delicate balance.
So far the information actually released by the NTSB appears to me to be consistent with the type of factual information normally released during a transportation accident investigation. It is unfortunate that some of the information released has been used by outside “experts” to reach conclusions about pilot performance or pilot errors prematurely. All the evidence is not in yet and conclusions about pilot errors are inappropriate.