The investigation into the Gulf Oil Spill has become a disarrayed mess. What the public expects would be something along the lines of a National Transportation Safety Board review of the cockpit recorder tapes, followed by a preliminary assessment of likely causes with the airlines ordered to make key inspections of suspect items and the continued operation of the airline industry. Long experience has also taught us that human error is the primary cause of most airline accidents. What we've gotten so far in the Gulf has been a panicked administration instituting a six month shutdown of offshore drilling, against the recommendation of its own expert committee from the National Academy of Engineering. In a letter to the editor of the Wall Street Journal on Friday, Terry Barr of Samson Oil and Gas has produced a minute by minute timeline of the accident based on the publicly available data such as that which can be found on the very informative oil industry blog, The Oil Drum . Mr....(Read Full Post)