Originally Posted by
treadigraph
I'm curious... looking at the FR24 posted by Satco, the aircraft arrives overhead Culdrose at roughly 7000, and then carries out a wide circuit down past Mullion, over Goonhilly and back out over Falmouth Bay steadily losing height - even allowing for FR24 position errors that looks to me as though the Hawk may have been returning to base, positioning for a RIAB or landing, and the engine failure occurred much later in the sequence, down wind of the runway.
If it had happened at 14000' over Falmouth, wouldn't they have arrived over Culdrose and kept very tight to the airfield, with an eye on dropping it in Mounts Bay if necessary? Falmouth Bay in my experience usually has shipping at anchor awaiting quay space.
- When the a/c first appears on FR24 it is showing a height/altitude/level of around 14000' and the squawk says N/A
- The aircraft icon turns red (I believe this indicates a "track of interest" on fr24 so could be the system detecting 7700 ) just south of Trelisick Garden but now indicating 12,600' , however Squawk is still showing as N/A
- FR24 shows 7700 squawk appear as the a/c icon is overhead Penryn at 10,200'.
From that I suggest the problem did occur at a medium level but we cannot say if the appearance of 7700 at Penryn is when it was selected or simply when the tracking software detected it and it had been selected quite some time prior.
As for a recovery profile after that... I don't know serviceability of Culdrose radar at the time, how big its blindspot is overhead, nor the cloudbase, all of which would have a bearing on a visual PFL or radar PFL profile. There is an assumption of engine failure but we have no idea what else packed in, if indeed the engine was the initial problem.
We were not there, we were not in that cockpit so I'll wait for the report to come out.