ST
Wrt your posting 12 April:
BUT the a/c DID make a call – surely you are not saying that the ground controller could be so ambivalent about responding? This matter should be examined fully as I explained earlier.
Secondly, you rightly say that there was no option to climb, etc BUT this is not the point – I believe that there was a regular flight plan (for the typical milk run) for this bit whereby a close in approach was made to the Mull and thence up the coast (this was also suggested by one of the witnesses at one of the inquiries) and therefore it was not an unusual situation for such an aircraft to be in (coming in close and turning up the coast at low level) – let us be clear about this, they were not being constrained by limitations on that particular aircraft to stay low – it was their intention. It was not that they had left insufficient time to climb over the Mull – they were late making a small left turn. They were intending to go in close before the turn – they just went too close.
. It may well have been that, due to operational considerations, they were to come in particularly close; that is as the pax were such a potential target that the a/c should use the terrain to mask its approach. Way back when I originally made this assumption, I had suggested that they may have used DME for judging the close in turning point but repeatedly got the simplistic reply that it was not an operational flight and therefore would not deviate from the flying regs (VFR vs IMC) and therefore would not rely on DME (in this case a function of the TACAN) when at low level flying visual; I am thankful, therefore, to you for your comment that it was, effectively, an operational flight.
Again I call for pilots who did this run to come forward and clear up this issue of what was the practice – if you know someone, lean on them!