judges and magistrates have no such prejudice, of course, because it is trained out of them and they work only on evidence
Ironically it is not the prospect of having an in-flight emergency and having to deal with that, that I am afraid of. I am more afraid of the interviews and questioning by the authorities after I (hopefully) successfully deal with it, for fear that I inadvertently did something wrong to induce the accident in the first place.
In Norway the police and the bureau of investigation works completely independent of each other. This is by law. If you don’t know about it, it can lead to unwanted things happening because the police wants to be finished as soon as possible while the bureau of investigation is more at snail speed.
There is a well known incident about a German pilot (who else ) who got caught up in this, with bad outcome for both him and the bureau of investigation, as well as poor PR for the local police.
One of our club members ‘landed out’ on a trip to Aboyne (Deeside Gliding Club). A woman (English, and certainly a new resident of the area) saw him fly over low and disappear behind a row of trees and called the Police saying “a plane had crashed” (in reality, he had made a normal glider outlanding in a field – I say the person who called the Police was certainly a new resident because anyone who’s lived there for more than a few months would be used to gliders landing in the surrounding fields – it’s not infrequent for rotor to visit the glider port, and gliders are then directed to land out and wait for collection later – they tend to have an agreement with one of the farmers to use a large field they can aerotow out of).
The Police duly show up, wade through a knee deep river and through all the brambles to get to the field where the glider was (and there was a road just the other side of the field!), and brethalyze our club member. They were still there when we arrived with the trailer, and helped us de-rig and put the glider in its box.
In Hungary, the police gets immediately involved any avation realted incident and accident if aware of that.
If you land on field, they will be there and try to get involed the case.
To suspend your licesnse, according to EASA PART -ORO, CAA has to run its own independent investigation, and then they are entitled to suspend you unless you really crashedby your obvious mistake.
Beside that, our national TSB runs its independent investigation.
In the U.K. does the ANO delegate breathalyser authority to the local police; or is that power retained by the CAA and/or the AAIB?
If the later, would a pilot automatically be found guilty (under the Road Traffic Acts?) if he refused to be breathalysed claiming the police were “exceeding their authority”?
Peter wrote:
in the UK, the CAA prosecutes
But who investigates? I would assume the CAA does not investigate the cause of the accident as such? It is done by independent investigators?
The UK CAA has its own investigators, who are (generally) ex police officers.
Timothy wrote:
The UK CAA has its own investigators, who are (generally) ex police officers.
Isn’t that a mix of roles? In Norway the police investigates on their behalf, as is done in all accidents with personal injury or death (not just aviation). Their role is to find the general cause of action, secure the crash site etc, and to prosecute if criminal action is found. The bureau of investigation also starts their investigation. They don’t prosecute, they answer to no one, and their job is to find the cause and suggest improvement. The CAA (LT) does nothing, other than necessary operational actions like grounding planes and so on.
No, that investigation (investigating whether law has been broken, and possibly staring a prosecution) is separate from the accident investigation. In the UK, the former is done by the CAA and/or the police, the latter by the the AAIB (Air Accident Investigation Branch), which is completely independent.
