This is missing the forest for the trees. The context is a passenger aircraft whose normal job is to transport families, so "level 3" is all that matters.
No, the context is internal communications between employees during the design and construction phase of the aircraft.
Imagine if your conversations of various bugs for a software project that you were building were released after the fact, what do you think they would sound like out of context?
I generally try not to write things at work that could look bad to the NY Times, but my point was just that it's overanalyzing to distinguish between levels of confidence here. In context, if the crashes hadn't happened, maybe it wasn't all that significant. But at least momentarily, it must have seemed important to the writer. It is true that often at work I'm concerned about something, and it's because I'm confused so when I'm reassured I realize my earlier comments are inapplicable.
