JW411
We must have our wires completely crossed here.
Destination (and en-route) METARs are very valuable in the GA context. Not in your airliner context because your flight takes you say 10 hours and also with Cat 3 or whatever capability, plus anti-ice, plus the TAS to raise the airframe to a temperature equivalent to 10k-20k feet below where you really are, etc, there are very few times that weather will stop you. Whereas most PPL-level GA flights cover very short distances (typically under 100 miles) and the PPL license constraints (not to mention the constraints of the aircraft typically involved) are so severe that even a slight difference between a METAR and a TAF is enough to make the arrival (and probably the flight too) technically illegal.
Often the actual is a lot worse than the TAF for the relevant period. So, would you depart on a 1hr flight when the METAR says OVC005 when the TAF says SCT015 so clearly the met office got it wrong?
I remember once asking an instructor: if you were doing an NDB approach, and you had a GPS also, and the ADF was telling you that you will live and the GPS was telling you that you will die, which would you trust? His reply was that he would trust the ADF. He was a gold plated JAA ATPL, in case anyone wonders. A complete moron IMHO.
None of the above is intended to apply to the AAIB report. To me, it looks like the man was most keen to make a covert landing at the farm strip to unload the cargo and then proceed to Shoreham for the official landing. I doubt that weather considerations came into his decision making very much and if they did then he got it wrong. Lots of pilots get it wrong; I hear the resulting conversations on the radio fairly frequently.