A better way would have been for any one of four people on board to say "this is not a good idea". I'm bewildered why nobody said so. I'm left to wonder if they had a newly minted 200 hour co-pilot on board who didn't have an ounce of operational experience, but had a bit of gumption, would have piped up and said so
On what grounds would either of the two back seaters say "this is not a good idea", the two front seaters were quite happy with what they were doing. We have a tendency to accept that those in a position of power know what they are doing. If you recall we carried a chart in the cockpit detailing the CDP for take off, trouble was it was all bollox and if things turned to worms on a take off I may have been attending your funeral, no pilot ever detected that the information had been pulled out of some ones backside, took years to get the info corrected. How did you plan for a shore based alternate on all your flights? Supplement in the flight manual from the Authority demanded one, as did the ops manual. Did you put in an incident report as the Authority demanded when required to shut down off shore because every thing on shore was clagged? Did any co-pilot coming into the organisation ever question how things were done? Not to my knowledge, though some captains did, but they soon fell into line. Had you had an engine failure coming off Mackerel with 600 lb of gas and been told home and ESL clagged, what then? Normalisation of deviance.
I'm pretty sure I know of the incident of which you speak, not much Marty hasn't told me, tooling about in fog, some thing done by all, but the organisation was not one to address issues other than giving the individual lowest on the totem pole a good kicking, I can give you a copy of a letter received by one (TE) who was a mere bystander to an incident that management had been told was going to occur if they didn't get their act in order. In typical management cowardice the lowest on the totem pole was given the task of penning the letter, BM. Remember taking a bunch of overseas VIPs offshore and one saying "I thought this was a VFR operation", yer, right, typical management completely out of the loop as to what goes on at the coal face because the budget is sacrosanct when it comes to spending money on infrastructure.