I’m not sure if this is still common practice or not, but why are/were plane instruments noted in their final positions when investigating an accident?
Would these dials not be tossed around like crazy during an accident? How do investigators know the dials are in their final positions from reading the information and didn’t just land in those positions during the accident? Do the instruments not move around more than I think?
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In additional to being a investigation tool used in the past, many light planes still don’t have Flight Data Recorders and also in bigger planes the FDR can often fail to capture the last few minutes of data.
A broken instrument is like having a murder scene with a broken wristwatch. The watch may or may not have been set correctly before the murder, it may have been smashed before or after the murder but in the absence of other data it is a clue. Many investigations in the past have used final instrument readings and lever settings as part of their clues to reach a conclusion. Ultimately you want to have multiple clues that match up and corroborate each other.
However the latest jumbo jets have what’s called a Glass Cockpit – which mean that it’s all digital displays in the cockpit now. The position of physical levers like the flaps lever would still definitely be closely noted by crash investigators. If that had to become a critical part of the investigation then experts can take months analyzing the likelihood of whether that position is the final position as set by one of the pilots or whether there’s say stress damage to show that the lever maybe been moved by the impact.
I know some of the Electronic Flight Instruments could still be checked for final data via a chip on them but I don’t know if that’s standard on all of them or not, but that would involve sending it back to the original manufacturer to be checked in their labs.
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