In case you are not on the mailing list, we received this from the Safety Office of the Reno FSDO today. Thought you might be interested.

On a related note, in my effort to catch up on my magazine reading I came across an article last night about learning from other’s mistakes. It should be pretty obvious that as individuals we are not going to live long enough to make all of the possible flying errors ourselves no matter how much it seems we are trying. So, we need to learn from the mistakes of others. This particular article explained that reading the accident report and then the NTSB’s probable cause finding is not really going to teach you much, especially with some of the generic findings that they publish.

What we should do is read the report, learn all that the investigators learned and then generate our own finding of a probable cause. Only then should you read the NTSB’s opinion and compare the two results.

The links below that are labeled Accident Report take you to the NTSB page with a short synopsis and the Probable Cause. But in the right column there is a link to ‘Related Report’, one of which is a pdf starting with AAR. That is the report of all of the findings in the investigation. Try taking a look at it before you read their probable cause determination.