pogo wrote:
IMHO, the biggest difference between air and road accident investigation is that the former is to find out what happened and what lessons can be learned, whereas the latter is to decide who to blame.
This is a tough one. Air accident investigation has incrementally yielded huge benefits. There are large economies of scale and commonality in that system – a single investigation may cost the earth but potentially applies to all future operations, and the cost of each failure is enormous.
Unfortunately, the same economies of scale and commonality do not apply to the same extent with car crashes. A single failure is a hundred times less catastrophic, the investigation rarely yields novel data (so does not apply to many future operations) and they are so commonplace that huge tax resources are required to fund investigations.
But most damaging is this fact - air accident investigations are most commonly carried out in the middle of nowhere, miles from the centres of operations, where the passage of time is not important - airports do not close. But car crash investigations usually close the roads, making huge impacts all over the place, to the point where the system is crippled by
everyday events.
Basically, the system is more important than a crash. An alternative might be a 1-in-N policy, where only, say, 1 in 5 accidents is rigorously investigated by the full team, no corners are cut. And the rest are given the “half hour poke around”. That trade-off would allow the system to function most of the time, yet novel findings would surface in the end. But the brits have entirely forgotten about the 80/20 law, and now they can’t rationally set any policy at all.