ShyTorque
Yes I was on the downwash bit
- but did you get the point of approaching quickly a familair spot with some kind of local reference working?
I know you are very experienced - I am just pointing out some things that you may have missed because they are a bit out of the ordinary.
Try this bit of fantasy:
You've been there before; there's a blanket of fog but you know it isn't too thick - right on the ground, just hiding details, you can see intermittently the ground from some distance;
you have what you believe to be an accurate DME distance to that spot (let's go along with this for this little fantasy);
at what distance would you slow down significantly and start feeling your way along? - 2 miles, 1 mile, 1/2 mile, 100yds?
You would know better than me - I would have thought that you would not dither about, that you would get in close as smartly as you reckon is safe - a bit different to feeling your way through bad conditions to an unfamiliar site?
You see I have always maintained that it was not a question of them being
in cloud but rather one of judging their distance
from cloud - one of the few aspects that I can contribute strongly on here is the weather as I have been in that area in such conditions and, I humbly suggest, understand them well.
I do not believe, with the view of the ground I believe they had, that such an experienced and able crew would have trusted their visual judgment any closer in than the position of waypoint change - Flt Lt Tapper had reservations about the accuracy of the STANS and so I doubt if they would have even proceeded with waypoint A still selected - at the speed they were going at.
As it seems unlikely from their actions at waypoint change that they had (control, etc) problems, one can only conclude that they must have had some reference system in which they trusted
at that point.
Otherwise, they would surely have exercised prudence.
I have been through this many times and still the only action that fits all the known parameters (and there are a lot) is that they had the intention of approaching a specific point for either a landing or a low pass and that something they
had to have been referring to misled them, principally in terms of range to go - the one nav thing helo pilots do put a lot of trust in is a DME system (intrinsically accurate) - that is why I have suggested a candidate system.
Is there anything else that they could have been using - equipment or procedure (eg talkdown by a third party, anything)?
For those of you who stick to the "official" line of them just passing by the Mull en route, please refer to large scale maps, use a PC flight simulator, go on a flight there from Campbeltown on a clear day, take a boat trip around the Mull, look at the area with side perspective on Google Earth - the Mull is an area of low hills, of limited extent isolated in the broader area of low ground and sea - you'd have to try to hit it.
If you plot the position of waypoint change, let alone waypoint A, you'll find that following the direct bearing to Corran would have taken you over an even higher bit of the Mull than that they ran into - this gives rise to three possibilities:
1 they had already gone too close in to be just doing a route plan as per the STANS - so forget the significance of them switching waypoints to Corran - they had decided to visually fly up the shoreline with no navigation system set up to practically assist them;
2 as is the "official" line, they had decided to climb and continue as in IMC - despite knowing their proximity to the ground and in the direction of this limited extent of high ground;
3 they were heading for the landing area at waypoint A (for whatever reason).
.
Presumably, they then could have had the control problems suggested (by the Mull group) in any of the above scenarios to explain the crash - but my point here is that they had taken one of these options at a point when they had no such problems. Which one seems the most reasonable?
No. 3 seems to be shunned by reflex, no one had heard of such plans, etc, but so many parameters fit this: it has been the case that each individual parameter I have suggested as pointing to that action has been deprecated - however, when you get several parameters, however weak individually, pointing the same way you get a statistical correlation that makes that way extremely likely.
Likely enough, I suggest, for it to be at least worthy of constructive discussion - and it is this third option that allows the possiblity of a third party screwing up.