cazatou
You make an important point when you say that this theory “… requires that there was a modification to the aircrafts navigation system that was not recorded in the F700 and the aircraft crashed whilst the Crew were trialling this equipment.”
The onboard equipment needed would have been an ARS6 module in the avionics racks and no such thing was ever mentioned in the inquiries to my knowledge – while it was a module designed to be easily removable and transferable between 47Ds/HC2s, presumably if it had been removed at the crash site there could still have been evidence for this (eg one could hardly expect anyone other than an avionics tech to have a blank panel with him to fill the hole or stow the connector correctly or do up the retaining screws, etc).
UNFORTUNATELY such anomalies, had they been noticed, may have been put down to techs not following procedure in that last minute work on the avionics racks as investigators were perhaps unfamiliar with what went in that spot as the system was not fitted to HC2s until a year later and so missed the significance.
As you yourself would know,
<<… on return from the first sortie Flt Lt Tapper informed the avionics specialists that they had had been getting spurious indications on the Super Tans BUT he did not place the equipment unservicable. In an effort to trace the fault the Groundcrew removed the avionics boxes and did a quick functional check (which failed to show any faults) and then replaced the boxes. No paperwork was raised which resulted in the Grouncrew concerned having a one sided interview with OCEng.>> (sic)
And there was that Sunday Express article <<… that arrests were expected following a SIB investigation that showed that the aircrafts flight instrumentation had been tampered with by disaffected technicians.>> wasn’t there? – however ridiculous in its entirety surely no smoke without fire?
<<Incidentally, where did the story about US Navy SEALS come from?>>
Several references actually and comment from locals I spoke to when I visited the area.
One article specifically mentioned that the US personnel were “challenged” by authorities as to what they were doing there to which the reply came that they were looking for their equipment.
How about a little human interest story on this subject? Here goes: it would appear that, if psychological trauma counts, the Americans suffered that day too; I was told by locals that some of the US personnel had digs in Cambeltown; a landlady showed me the room where a young member of the SEALS (as she believed) had been staying over a period around the crash date; she told me that for several nights after the crash the young man had woken up the entire house with his screams and that she had had to dump his mattress after he left as it was saturated (her word) in sweat.