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?
In: 3
The final position of the instruments can be a piece of the puzzle. The FDR and CVR might give enough clues, but the final seconds might be a gap in the timeline.
Some dials and instruments might be knocked around and be useless, but depending on the accident, the instruments might be mostly intact. In these cases, the instruments are locked in their last position, and the investigators might be cross-checked with other evidence to verify if they are accurate.
One example might be that a plane crashed because the flaps or slats were not correctly configured. The investigators don’t know this, but their analysis of the black boxes will reveal the speed and altitude of the plane, which will reveal a flight pattern that doesn’t match what should happen if things were correctly configured, so they would have to investigate reasons why the plane might not have enough lift. If the issue is with flaps, and they look at the controls and find the final position of the flaps and it matches what they theorise, it may explain the most likely cause.
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