Fact Checking Nelson's "Doors Of Death" light aircraft near death experience

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Res Ipsa
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Re: Fact Checking Nelson's "Doors Of Death" light aircraft near death experience

Post by Res Ipsa »

No offense taken, IHAQ. But my work doesn’t involve helping insurance companies to avoid paying legitimate claims. Insurance companies in my state have a statutory duty of good faith and fair dealing, regulations That set out specific standards for regulating claim handling, and a law that specifically allows courts to award treble damages of an insurer denies a claim without a reasonable basis. We are known for having the most pro-insured courts in the country.

If I approached my job with the intent of figuring out clever ways to screw policyholders out of their benefits, my clients would end up paying out multiples of what they owed, damages caused by the failure to pay claims they owed, and both sides’ attorneys fees. And, I’d be fired.

Insurance companies don’t pay me to tell them what they want to hear or to rubber stamp their decision on a claim. They want me to do exactly what I’m doing here: making sure that they aren’t overlooking some material fact or making an unwarranted assumption. They may grumble when I tell them they owe a claim that they didn’t think they owed, but that’s what they pay me to do: help them avoid mistakes and make sure they are fulfilling their legal duties toward their policyholders.

The fact that you and some others think I’m trying to argue a case for defending Nelson indicates to me that I’m seeing a ton of confirmation bias and motivated reasoning. Look, we’ve just gone through the process of people reaching the wrong conclusion because they started running queries in databases without first making sure what the database contained and whether it included they type of document they were looking for from 45 years ago.

Now I’m seeing exactly the same thing with FOIA requests. People are making requests for 45 year old documents when they have no idea whether the NTSB has kept any of the type of document they are looking for.

Several folks here assume they know which, if any, 45-year old records the NTSB has preserved. I don’t know why they that. No one, to my knowledge, has tried to find out. I know that I don’t have any idea.

A couple of things that I know. In 2014, the National Archives inspected the NTSB document management systems and basically found chaos. The NTSB itself didn’t know what it had thrown away and what it had kept. If the agency did what was necessary to come into compliance with the governmental requirements for document management, one of the first steps would be to inventory the existing documents to know what it had. Then it had to have a plan with clear retention periods for each category of document. Finally, they would have to dispose of old documents that were beyond their disposal date and, going forward, they had to throw out records at the end of their retention periods.

The answers to the FOIA requests came back pretty darn fast. Do you think that someone went to wherever NTSB stores 45 year old files and hunted through boxes trying to find the requested documents? Or do you think they looked at a list or index of the categories of documents in the NTSB’s possession and the date range for each type?

The final assumption being made is how the FOIA person would respond if the “search” consisted of looking at an index or inventory, discovering that all documents of the type requested dated before, say, 1990, had been throw out. If lawyers were in charge of the wording of responses, I’d bet it would look exactly like the the response we got.

But all that’s testable. It just takes some advance thinking and effort.
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Re: Fact Checking Nelson's "Doors Of Death" light aircraft near death experience

Post by Doctor CamNC4Me »

Ok. Here's the response I received:
Dear Dr. CamNC4Me:

The Flight Standards Service is responding to your FOIA request under Title 5 United States Code, Section 552, dated April 4, 2021, pertaining to information for a Sky West commercial flight that took place on November 12, 1976, from SLC to SGU, potentially suffering an inflight engine malfunction, causing an emergency landing either in Delta, Utah, or Cedar City, Utah, landing location unknown.

A thorough search within the Flight Standards Service revealed no records related to your request. Any records we may have had were destroyed in accordance with the Records Retention Schedule, as referenced in Federal Aviation Administration Order 1350.14B.
So, there it is. Very interesting!

- Doc
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Re: Fact Checking Nelson's "Doors Of Death" light aircraft near death experience

Post by DrW »

Doctor CamNC4Me wrote:
Fri Apr 09, 2021 8:07 pm
Ok. Here's the response I received:
Dear Dr. CamNC4Me:

The Flight Standards Service is responding to your FOIA request under Title 5 United States Code, Section 552, dated April 4, 2021, pertaining to information for a Sky West commercial flight that took place on November 12, 1976, from SLC to SGU, potentially suffering an inflight engine malfunction, causing an emergency landing either in Delta, Utah, or Cedar City, Utah, landing location unknown.

A thorough search within the Flight Standards Service revealed no records related to your request. Any records we may have had were destroyed in accordance with the Records Retention Schedule, as referenced in Federal Aviation Administration Order 1350.14B.
So, there it is. Very interesting!

- Doc

Original FAA or NTSB paper records may have been destroyed according to policy. However, the information in those records, including the accompanying report files, was clearly scraped and published digitally prior to their destruction. Several here, myself included, have reviewed those saved digital records and found no mention of the Russell M. Nelson event in 1976.

As mentioned upthread, I have also checked a few years before and after 1976 and found nothing of relevance. It should be clear that destruction of original paper records would have no effect whatsoever on the validity of the scraped and digitally preserved information .
Last edited by DrW on Fri Apr 09, 2021 9:13 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Fact Checking Nelson's "Doors Of Death" light aircraft near death experience

Post by Lem »

Res Ipsa wrote:
Fri Apr 09, 2021 7:08 pm

The fact that you and some others think I’m trying to argue a case for defending Nelson indicates to me that I’m seeing a ton of confirmation bias and motivated reasoning....
Maybe that's part of the confusion. I certainly don't think that, and I'm not really seeing anyone telling you that, but this is a long thread, so I may have missed something. In fact I thought that several times in this thread you had indicated that exaggerating up from a simpler story was one of several explanations you would consider feasible, so I don't see you as already taking a position.

Regarding your point about knowing the underlying rules, I agree totally. Once in consulting on a zoning issue, I had a zoning lawyer tell me I couldn't bring up a certain position. He was adamant about it. Going back and doing a thorough investigation, it turned out that in general he was correct, BUT only under certain conditions. In the hearing, I presented the position, noted the part of the code I was using, and couched it perfectly in the acceptable terms. The lawyer for the opposing side did not object, but I did get the feeling he had been hoping a consultant wouldn't present such a thorough case.

So I have no problem with detail, it just has severely diminishing returns at some point, especially when absence of evidence can interminably be ascribed to incompleteness of the data, with no conclusion. The costs eventually outweigh the benefits.

My argument, if I understood your post correctly, is similar to the reason you recommended an offer of judgment in the murder case you mentioned, rather than spend the same amount fighting and winning, while also further traumatizing the family.
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Re: Fact Checking Nelson's "Doors Of Death" light aircraft near death experience

Post by Res Ipsa »

Lem wrote:
Fri Apr 09, 2021 8:50 pm
Res Ipsa wrote:
Fri Apr 09, 2021 7:08 pm

The fact that you and some others think I’m trying to argue a case for defending Nelson indicates to me that I’m seeing a ton of confirmation bias and motivated reasoning....
Maybe that's part of the confusion. I certainly don't think that, and I'm not really seeing anyone telling you that, but this is a long thread, so I may have missed something. In fact I thought that several times in this thread you had indicated that exaggerating up from a simpler story was one of several explanations you would consider feasible, so I don't see you as already taking a position.

Regarding your point about knowing the underlying rules, I agree totally. Once in consulting on a zoning issue, I had a zoning lawyer tell me I couldn't bring up a certain position. He was adamant about it. Going back and doing a thorough investigation, it turned out that in general he was correct, BUT only under certain conditions. In the hearing, I presented the position, noted the part of the code I was using, and couched it perfectly in the acceptable terms. The lawyer for the opposing side did not object, but I did get the feeling he had been hoping a consultant wouldn't present such a thorough case.

So I have no problem with detail, it just has severely diminishing returns at some point, especially when absence of evidence can interminably be ascribed to incompleteness of the data, with no conclusion. The costs eventually outweigh the benefits.

My argument, if I understood your post correctly, is similar to the reason you recommended an offer of judgment in the murder case you mentioned, rather than spend the same amount fighting and winning, while also further traumatizing the family.
Thanks. I was addressing the notion of making a case defending Nelson. Comments to that effect have been made a few times, and I appreciate your feedback on my attempts to explain.

Among the questions I’ve been asking myself throughout this are whether I’ve crossed the line from trying not to miss a reasonably plausible scenario to simply special pleading and whether I’m shifting goalposts. Let me describe where I think that line is with respect to this issue of FOIA requests to the NTSB.

We have a report from seven years ago that says the NTSB didn’t know what documents were and were not in its possession and that it was not complying with wherever were its document retention policies at the time. One of the recommendations was to go office by office and figure out which paper records it had.

I think it’s entirely reasonable to assume that the NTSB made efforts to get its house in order and get into compliance with records management compliance. So, I’m not talking about an ad hoc rationalization that maybe that specific document we can’t find was somehow lost. I’m saying something like if we go to the local library and look for a specific issue of National Geographic from 1945 of the library’s collection only goes back to 1950. We can’t assume we can find something in a database when the type of record we are looking for was never entered in the database in the first place. We can’t assume that we can find something in the NTSB’s paper “database” unless we know whether the NTSB has attempted to preserve the type and age of document we are looking for. That’s fully testable and not subject to an infinite series of ad hoc excuses.
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Re: Fact Checking Nelson's "Doors Of Death" light aircraft near death experience

Post by Dr Moore »

It may ultimately be that the secret to knowing the truth of Nelson’s flight that day is hidden from all lazy learners and lax disciples.
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Re: Fact Checking Nelson's "Doors Of Death" light aircraft near death experience

Post by Philo Sofee »

Dr Moore wrote:
Fri Apr 09, 2021 11:20 pm
It may ultimately be that the secret to knowing the truth of Nelson’s flight that day is hidden from all lazy learners and lax disciples.
:lol: :lol: :lol:
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Re: Fact Checking Nelson's "Doors Of Death" light aircraft near death experience

Post by Res Ipsa »

Doctor CamNC4Me wrote:
Fri Apr 09, 2021 8:07 pm
Ok. Here's the response I received:
Dear Dr. CamNC4Me:

The Flight Standards Service is responding to your FOIA request under Title 5 United States Code, Section 552, dated April 4, 2021, pertaining to information for a Sky West commercial flight that took place on November 12, 1976, from SLC to SGU, potentially suffering an inflight engine malfunction, causing an emergency landing either in Delta, Utah, or Cedar City, Utah, landing location unknown.

A thorough search within the Flight Standards Service revealed no records related to your request. Any records we may have had were destroyed in accordance with the Records Retention Schedule, as referenced in Federal Aviation Administration Order 1350.14B.
So, there it is. Very interesting!

- Doc
Doc, to clarify, did you make that request of the FAA or the NTSB?
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Re: Fact Checking Nelson's "Doors Of Death" light aircraft near death experience

Post by Res Ipsa »

Dr Moore wrote:
Fri Apr 09, 2021 11:20 pm
It may ultimately be that the secret to knowing the truth of Nelson’s flight that day is hidden from all lazy learners and lax disciples.
If so, then I am certain never to know it. :mrgreen:
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Re: Fact Checking Nelson's "Doors Of Death" light aircraft near death experience

Post by Lem »

Philo Sofee wrote:
Fri Apr 09, 2021 11:51 pm
Dr Moore wrote:
Fri Apr 09, 2021 11:20 pm
It may ultimately be that the secret to knowing the truth of Nelson’s flight that day is hidden from all lazy learners and lax disciples.
:lol: :lol: :lol:
Clearly he has never read a thread here. For the most part, we are the antithesis of lazy and lax.
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