The Occurrence Report Nobody Can Sign
A squadron log contains this draft occurrence report, reproduced with its original punctuation:
"DURING THE PRE-FLIGHT THE TECHNICIAN TOLD THE FLIGHT ENGINEER THAT HE HAD MISSED THE CRACK IN THE BELLY SKIN WHICH WAS NOT RECORDED IN THE LOG AND THE AIRCRAFT WAS RELEASED FOR THE SORTIE."
Three people were present: the technician, the flight engineer, and the authorising engineer who signed the release. There is one crack, one missing log entry, and one release. The authorising engineer must sign the corrected report before it reaches the wing safety officer at 1600. The squadron commander wants a version that a board of inquiry can read without having to ask who did what, and without any statement that could later be shown to be false.
1. Identify the structural faults that make the sentence unusable in an inquiry, and say what each one could wrongly imply.
Read the worked answer
1. Ambiguous pronoun. "HE had missed the crack" - he can be the technician or the flight engineer (the nearest male noun). Read one way, the technician missed the crack; read the other, the engineer did. In an inquiry these are different findings against different people.
2. Misplaced relative clause. "...the crack in the belly skin WHICH WAS NOT RECORDED IN THE LOG" - which attaches to the nearest noun, the belly skin (or the crack), not to the intended object, the log entry. As written it says a crack was not recorded, when the intended meaning is that the defect was not entered in the log.
3. Fused clauses with a bare "and". "...NOT RECORDED IN THE LOG AND THE AIRCRAFT WAS RELEASED..." joins two independent statements with no punctuation or connector of cause. It hides the sequence and the causal link between the missing entry and the release.
4. Agentless passive. "WAS RELEASED" removes the person who released the aircraft - the one fact the board most needs.
2. Rewrite the report as three short sentences that name every actor and cannot be misread. State any assumption you had to make.
Read the worked answer
Rewrite (assuming the technician was the person who found the defect and the engineer failed to log it - the author must confirm this before signing):
- During the pre-flight inspection, the technician found a crack in the belly skin and reported it to the flight engineer.
- The flight engineer did not record the crack in the aircraft log.
- The authorising engineer released the aircraft for the sortie without the defect being entered in the log.
Why this version works: each sentence has one actor in the subject position, which is gone, and the causal chain (found → not logged → released) is explicit and in order.
Assumption flagged: the original does not actually establish that the engineer missed the crack. If the engineer never received the report, sentence 2 must read "the report did not reach the flight engineer" - the difference matters and must be checked with the technician before signature.
3. The commander suggests simply replacing "HE" with "the technician" and leaving the rest. Explain why that is not an acceptable fix.
Read the worked answer
It repairs one of four faults and leaves three live:
- The which clause still attaches to the belly skin, so the report still states the wrong fact about the log.
- The fused "and" clause still conceals the sequence between the missing entry and the release.
- "Was released" still hides the authorising engineer.
Worse, it creates a new risk: the edit asserts as fact that the technician missed the crack. If the evidence later shows the engineer simply never logged a correct report, the signed statement is false - and a false statement in an occurrence report is a more serious problem than an unclear one.
Rule to apply: a correction that resolves a grammatical ambiguity by silently choosing one of two possible meanings is not editing, it is evidence-tampering. The author must establish the facts first, then write them down plainly.