That's a disturbing statement - you don't regard a formal pilot report as actual evidence?
I didn't say it wasn't evidence (that's why I included it in my statement). I don't consider it
strong and reliable information, especially coming from two individuals in a highly stressful situation, coupled with a strong motivation to not be completely forthcoming.
The potential to misremember details or information in such situations is well documented:
Why Science Tells Us Not to Rely on Eyewitness Accounts
The Problem With Eyewitness Testimony
Safety investigators do take pilots' recall into account but it is highly tempered with external evidence. Unless it is corroborated with other evidence, it should be given minimal weight. Quoting researchers in the field relays this idea better than I could in this limited space:
"When memory serves as evidence... there are a number of important limitations to the veracity of that evidence. This is because memory does not provide a veridical representation of events as experienced. Rather, what gets
encoded into memory is determined by what a person attends to, what they already have stored in memory, their expectations, needs and emotional state. This information is subsequently integrated (
consolidated) with other information that has already been stored in a person's long-term, autobiographical memory. What gets
retrieved later from that memory is determined by that same multitude of factors that contributed to encoding as well as what drives the recollection of the event. Specifically, what gets retold about an experience depends on whom one is talking to and what the purpose is of remembering that particular event (e.g., telling a friend, relaying an experience to a therapist, telling the police about an event). Moreover, what gets remembered is reconstructed from the remnants of what was originally stored; that is, what we remember is constructed from whatever remains in memory following any forgetting or interference from new experiences that may have occurred across the interval between storing and retrieving a particular experience. Because the contents of our memories for experiences involve the active manipulation (during encoding), integration with pre-existing information (during consolidation), and reconstruction (during retrieval) of that information, memory is, by definition, fallible at best and unreliable at worst."
Mark L. Howe
Department of Psychology, Centre for Memory and Law, City University London, London, UK
