Aviation accident investigations always follow a protocol of data gathering without assuming causal events. It is the cornerstone of aviation safety in most of the world.
I was the president of the accident board that killed a good friend of mine...he was a Sikorsky pilot and I was his roommate when I was the chief government pilot at the factory. I was "geo-batching" during the week in Bridgeport and driving home to my family every weekend. Yong Lee and I became very good friends.
Yong and Dave Kish were in a hover at 250' AGL at the factory doing airborne compass rose checks on a CH-53E when the accident occurred. The main rotor, according to witnesses, tilted back to a degree that it impacted the tail section of the aircraft and the helo basically ate itself up at full power. All four aboard were lost.
The Sikorsky Fire Department was able to put the fire out in under a minute so we had the entire drive train to work with. This would be key.
Over the next weeks we were certain of the cause of the accident. The duplex swashplate on the 53E (which is huge) has a series of bearing "races" that act as the mechanical interface between the stationary swashplate and the rotating swashlpate. This assembly, attached to the helicopters transmission, controls all pilot input to the main rotor.
The below is an H060 swashplate. You can see the pitch change rods (which have blue. yellow and red tape on them...and there is a forth, I promise) that rotate. The center section, with the hole in it, does not. The rotating part rest on bearings a top the stationary plate.
The 53E has seven blades and is huge.
The bearing failed and the pitch change rods, because of the lateral forces, snapped and the main rotor on the 53E was no longer controlled and tilted aft, taking the aircraft apart in the worst possible flight regime.
I'm going through all this because we knew the bearing race failed and were figuring out why. There was a lot at stake for all the companies involved but the accident investigation proceeded without interference, rancor or interruption: We followed the protocol that all accident investigations follow. Flight 800's accident investigation did not.
Interestingly, one of the accident investigators working for me, an engineer from MCAS Cherry Point, remember a accident with a Japanese 53E that had crashed a sea years before.
The transmission, including the swashplate assembly, was recovered and still being stored in Japan. We sent the engineer over. Amazingly, the Japanese had not taken the assembly apart during their accident investigation. There it sat.
When we opened it up we found the exact same failure mode that bough Yong's 53E to earth. Incredible. Same failure mode years apart. We grounded the whole 53E fleet.
Again, my point in all this is that aircraft accident investigations are what they are for specific, proven reasons. As I watched the unfolding events of the Flight 800 accident investigation it was clear to me that the protocol was being ignored. Again, I have no conspiracy thoughts, only that they were not following the tenets of aviation safety.