Perhaps you elect not to climb to Safety Altitude because the aircraft you're flying has been rushed into service without clearance to fly in icing conditions - conditions which you will undoubtedly encounter by climbing?
If your navigation system is unbounded (has no GPS or DME auto-correction) and has drifted without you having been alerted to the fact, if you think that you're exactly where the navigation system tells you that you are - and you see what looks like a small fog bank ahead, do you risk a short time in fog knowing that you'll be turning away from high ground shortly - or do you pull up into dangerous icing conditions?
And if your company has decided that it can't afford to fit ADRs or CVRs to your aircraft, let alone an accurate navigation system or a fully-tested full-authority digital engine control system, how will anyone know beyond any reasonable doubt whatever that any subsequent accident was caused by an error of judgement in accepting a brief entry into IMC which you've probably done many times before, or whether your navigation system has wandered, or whether your FADEC has glitched......or what on earth ever really happened? Simple - they cannot possibly ever know and all they can conclude is that the cause was not positively determined. All that can be concluded is that the aircraft flew into terrain - it can't be certain whether that was a CFIT accident or due to FADEC fault causing what was effectively a UCM.
I echo the comment regarding the decision to fly so many senior intelligence people in the same aircraft at the same time....WHY?
[ 06 February 2002: Message edited by: BEagle ]</p>