That is what the JAIC did. It stuck resolutely to the Herald of Free Enterprise blueprint and never once deviated from it. The several hundred pages of wave impact calculations and bow visor specifications were just window-dressing to pad out the report and give it some kind of plausibility. Taking three years to publish it helped keep up the subterfuge that they were working really really hard on finding out the cause of the accident.
How on earth is Sillaste and Linde the star witnesses, when it had Piht and Lieger?
It knew, of course, on Day One, the cause of the accident. And it was not a few strong waves...
Complete and utter bollocks.
There was a very clear initial suspicion about what had happened. But the JAIC investigators did not take that as their
a priori conclusion then look for evidence to support it.
Think of it perhaps this way: imagine that police were called to a house where they found a wife dead on the kitchen floor having been stabbed to death, and the husband with blood on his arms and hands and scratches on his hands and face.
The police would, entirely reasonably, strongly suspect that the wife had murdered by the husband - because that is what the initial evidence suggested. But the police would not decide that this was definitely what had happened, then go on a selective evidence hunt to support their theory. Instead, they'd park their initial hunch and set about gathering all available evidence - and they'd only come to a proper investigative conclusion based on an objective (and not suspect-centric) evaluation of the evidence.
Exactly the same sort of process happened with the Estonia disaster. There was fairly reliable evidence - within hours of the sinking - that the bow visor had detached from the ship and the bow ramp had been yanked open as well. And the investigators knew very well that this was immediately a viable cause (just as, if you know an aircraft's vertical tail fin fell off in flight, this is immediately a viable cause of the aircraft crashing).
But then they set about gathering evidence and witness testimony. They discovered within days that the bow visor was indeed separated from the ship, and lying on the sea bed a considerable distance away from the main wreckage. They could also see the damage to the bow ramp. And, piece by piece, their evidence pointed in one - and only one - direction: that the ship sank because the bow visor and bow ramp failed, allowing the vehicle deck to flood very quickly via the open bow; the combination of water on the vehicle deck (with associated free surface effect) and the mass of water that had travelled down from the vehicle deck to the decks below, ultimately caused a sufficient loss of buoyancy and stability to capsize the ship.
The JAIC investigators, and their experts, were well capable of using proper investigative methods and protocols to reach their conclusion. And they reached the correct conclusion. By contrast, you're hopelessly adrift here - you appear not to understand even the most simple/basic scientific principles at play, let alone perform cogent analysis - so your opinions about why the ship sank are, literally, worthless.
