Just watched an Air Crash Investigation episode in which the investigators studying the wreckage say that a certain bolt shearing off during flight caused the crash. How can they tell that the broken bolt was during flight and not because of the crash?
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One thing to remember is that all of the engineering and “forensic” evidence that’s been well explained by folks here doesn’t occur in isolation – there is a huge multidisciplinary team involved in investigating an airliner crash, smaller for a private aviation crash, but still more than one discipline. Police, forensic investigators, materials scientists and all sorts of folks make observations about the evidence they find and then work together to come up with theories. Smoking guns do exist, but it’s also likely someone didn’t pick up that bolt and say, “hey, this caused the crash.” Maybe a forensic anthropologist noticed an injury pattern on the passengers in one part of the plane, and some materials engineers also found metal shrapnel in the area that came from a part with a an alloy composition matching the wotzenhoffer thingamabob, and then they found the bolt that was supposed to keep the thingamabob secured to the hull and discovered that it had metal fatigue failures. All of those discoveries together support a theory that the bolt was the cause of the initial failure.
The reason planes are really safe is that the NTSB has zero sense of humor about crash investigations, and they’re really thorough.
Edit: a word correction
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