I did a little more digging on the subject of records that might still exist, focussing on the NTSB. In 2014, the National Archives did an inspection of the NTSB's records management systems. Some of the conclusions relevant to whether records from the 1970s still exist:
1.1 Finding: NTSB does not currently have a consolidated records inventory that includes information about where records are physically located, that identifies vital records, and that includes other information about records essential to a comprehensive inventory.
1.2 Finding: NTSB is not scheduling its records. As such, the agency is at risk of destroying records prematurely, maintaining records longer than necessary, and failing to transfer permanent records to the National Archives when appropriate.
1.3 Finding: NTSB does not adequately respond to notifications of records eligible for disposal from the WNRC.
2.1 Finding: NTSB has weak to non-existent procedures in place for ensuring a compliant records management program.
...
4.2 Finding: NTSB lacks agency policy on the integration of records management considerations into the design and development of electronic information systems.
4.3 Finding: There are no policies and procedures related to storing records and information on shared drives or for the proper storage of electronic records generally.
4.4 Finding: Long-term temporary and potentially permanent electronic records are maintained on a wide variety of media and have never been migrated to new media as required for preservation and accessibility.
https://www.archives.gov/files/records- ... ection.pdf
The text of the report is pretty grim. As of 2014, it doesn't sound like the NTSB knew which records had been preserved, and where any preserved records would be located. I'll look for a follow up report.
The Library of Congress has a collection of documents from the NTSB that includes documents from the 1970s. These are decisions in FAA enforcement actions. At least at that time, the NTSB provided the administrative law judges for hearings. So, if whatever happened resulted in a contested enforcement action that was heard by an administrative law judge, it might be in that collection.
https://blogs.loc.gov/law/2018/12/natio ... digitized/
I'm looking at filing a FOIA request for any records of Notifications under 49 CFR § 830.5 and the Reports on form 6120 under 48 CFR § 830.15. I found this Request for Authority to Dispose of Records made by the NTSB and approved by the GAO on 1/18/78. It's basically a records retention policy for certain NTSB documents. The periods relevant to documents we might be interested in are:
Form 6120s for Air Carriers Accidents: 15 years
Form 6120s for Non-Air Carrier Accidents: 7 years
Aircraft Incident Reports: 7 years (Under the regulations, should also be on a 6120)
Missing Aircraft Notifications: 20 years
All of these dates are after "close of case"
The only reference to Notifications is to the Missing Aircraft Notification. However, there is also a policy for a folder of working papers and other documents not related to a final determination of cause in "accident" cases. If that's where the NTSB kept records of Notifications in their files, the applicable retention period is 4 years.
I also ran some searches on the NTSB database just to see what is actually being searched. I found the following:
For at least the 1970s, what is being searched is not original documents. What is being searched are summaries of final determinations of probable cause. So, that means the NTSB investigated the event and issued some kind of final report. These are not the "Reports" that operators are required to file under notice and report regulations.
Many of the parameter selection tools don't work. These summaries were entered by a project in 2002 that added older records to the database. That project did not use fields that match many of the search parameter fields. So, for example, if you try to search for only accidents or only incidents, you'll get no hits. Likewise, searching by severity of damage doesn't work either. And, for whatever reason, the text search isn't reliable either. If you try to find all cases with substantial damage by putting "substantial" damage in the text box, it will find some, but not all, of the summaries that contain the word "substantial"
The date fields and the parameter search for states do work. So you can search for Utah records in a specified range of dates.
The database contains summaries of final reports of accidents and "selected" incidents. To get a feel for what "selected" means, I ran a query for all Utah records during 1976. The search returned 57 items. I reviewed each item to determine whether it was an "accident" or an "incident" The individual records do classify the degree of damage and severity of injury, which let me classify the events according to the definitions in the CFR. Of the 57 entries, 56 were accidents. All 56 classified the damage as either "substantial" or "destroyed." The only incident involved a pilot who became incapacitated on Western Airlines 737. There was a "precautionary landing" resulting in no damages or injury. Some of the information that normally appears in final reports is missing, such as the number of passengers.
The single report of an incident does state in the text that the event was classified as an incident. And the index list of records has a column titled "event severity" That column, which usually either says fatal or nonfatal, says "incident." As an event can be an accident based on severity of injury or damage, that really doesn't make sense. So, I won't rely on that for any future searches.