Originally Posted by
A Squared
I noticed a a few discrepancies like that in the report. It stated the propellers were Composite, which they are not, they're aluminum. The position of hte accident was given as S26°67.031" E028°28.461" which is just gibberish, not a valid set of coordinates. The actual position of the crash was about S25 40' E28 17'
Re - Composite. As I recall the preliminary report goes on to detail that the hub was one particular alloy and the blades a different one. I think that they mean composite as more than one piece or material. Perhaps an older use of the word but perhaps one time common in aviation to differentiate from a one piece propeller.
Re - co-ordinates.
A typo here. Supposed to be decimal degrees I guess. The number are all correct, someone stuck in the degrees symbol and moved the decimal point. Degrees Minutes.DecimalMinutes is quite a common way to write coordinates. It was used in a sailing course that I was on recently.
S26.67031 E028.28461
Notice 67.031 is very close to 40/60 x 100 and
28.461 is very close to 17/60 x 100
All very confusing.
In the UK the best maps (not aviation or marine) use a local co-ordinate system that dates from 1936.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ordnan..._National_Grid. Must have seemed a good idea at the time. The maps were created for military purposes originally. Google Maps does not understand it at all:-) The maps though are very good.