The Last Good Decision

The last good decision is From the Surviving Record's name for a point on a disaster's timeline where the information the people involved had at the time was enough to support a different action, and that action had a reasonable chance of changing the outcome.

It is a question about possible points of intervention. It asks where, given only what could be known then, events might still have been turned.

What every reconstruction sets out

Every reconstruction of an event on this site includes this analysis, and it always states three things:

• what the people involved could know at the time, according to the surviving record;
• what other action was open to them;
• the limits of the inference, including what the record does not show.

The first point keeps hindsight out. Information that came to light only afterward, from an inquiry or from later research, does not count toward what someone could have known that day.

Several candidates, or none

The analysis may name more than one candidate. It may also conclude that the last good decision cannot be determined from the surviving record, and that is a full answer, not a gap to be filled.

Nor does the answer have to differ from the familiar version of the story. When the record points to the same moment that popular accounts do, the entry says so.

Always inference

The last good decision always belongs to the level marked by dead reckoning on the evidence levels page. It reasons from the record toward what might have happened, which no document can confirm, so it is never presented as a fix.

When an official inquiry itself names a point where things could have gone differently, the entry reports that as the inquiry's view, attributed to it. That finding and this site's own analysis are kept apart, even when they agree.

Not a verdict on a person

Naming a decision point is not the same as blaming the person who made it. Decisions are taken inside orders, schedules, institutions and conditions, and the term is about the decision point, not the character of the person at it. Responsibility is a separate question that needs its own evidence.