Chinook - Still Hitting Back 3 (Merged)

[walter kennedy]

Arkroyal
With regard to your 1st point, may I refer you to Boeing’s document:
8-7D20-DS S-03 06, Enclosure 4
Dated: June 18,2002
Mull of Kintyre -Analysis of Available Data
This suggests to me that they selected the next waypoint while not steering away from the landmass – at that point, if they were experiencing any difficulties, they would hardly be expected to be bothering with inputting changes to their route navigation.

With regard to your 2nd point:
With respect, the simplistic IMC vs VFR argument may not be appropriate here; the regular route was, I believe, a low level approach to the Mull with a close in turn, thereafter handrailing up the coast, perfectly reasonable for a comfortable flight in the prevailing conditions in the area – that is at low level where visibility was good.
The only problem here is that the Mull would often have a localized mist due to the prevailing wind forcing moist air up over the Mull often obscuring detail that a pilot would need to judge his distance off. This is further exacerbated in this case as the approach direction is very much “end on” to the headland hindering spatial orientation between, say, a couple of laterally displaced large topographical features. Provided that the pilot can judge his distance off, then there would be no problem flying VFR (a point made somewhere in one of the enquiries) – but at the speed in question, how could he do that safely? If he could not see sufficient ground detail, he would have to use the TANS (which was ignored in this case) or play it very safe and turn away well clear (try flying close to a large cloud as opposed to a small one that one can see around). It would be a shame to not be able to come close in for, say, operational reasons, in these circumstances for want of a simple, reliable beacon that could have been placed for the convenience of just such (regular?) flights at little expense.
Of course, this could be simply addressed by others who flew such flights – hence my previous post.

Your closing remark “…..
The point is, the evidence required to find negligence simply does not exist, in the same way that there is no evidence to prove the opposite.
No evidence = No Known Cause = cleared pilots. …..”
Misses the point that there is a lot more to this tragic event than the loss of those on board if there was any foul play – there was an opportunity for foul play if a local navaid was used – and this must be addressed.

ZD576’s TACAN CU was set to ch107 (if the Boeing report is correct in this regard) – I cannot identify anything relevant on any frequency listings in the public domain – does this channel ring a bell with anyone reading this?