Dichotomy in What Went Wrong in January's Sport Aviation

After reading the nicely informative article "Electrical Failure" in What Went Wrong that appeared in the January, 2014 issue of Sport Aviation, I noticed a quite striking dichotomy between the body of the article and the disclaimer at the article's end. The article ends with a statement reading in part, "This article is based solely on the official final NTSB report of the accident ..." In the body of the article on page 79, it says, "...it was a pretty big deal when the Lancair owner began to have intermittent electrical problems about two months before the accident. He told others that he had moved the switch to extend the landing gear, but nothing happened. After a short time, the hydraulic motor turned on and powered the landing gear down. There is no mention of problems retracting the Lancair gear in the NTSB accident report (emphasis added), but the pilot told others that the gear-extension issues continued on each flight."

"There is no mention of problems retracting the Lancair gear in the NTSB accident report", and "This article is based solely on the official final NTSB report of the accident" are mutually incongruous. Either one or the other is true, and the opposite isn't.

I'd rather have all the facts rather than only those in the NTSB accident reports, so I vote for discontinuing the boiler-plate statement at the end that was probably written by some pedantic lawyer and is blatantly false with regards to this article. “The first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers.” William Shakespeare, King Henry VI, Part 2, Scene II.

In the past few years, the NTSB has made the full docket available online...not just the report, but the photos, police reports, witness statements, etc.

One possibility is that there's a witness statement in the NTSB package that isn't addressed in the report narrative. If the investigator didn't have any confirmation or for some reason didn't believe the witness, it may not have been included. The author may have got his information from this additional information.

Just a possibility, mind you.

Ron Wanttaja