I need to start up a separate thread regarding Charter Ops, but I am a bit shocked by their methods sometimes. I recently had a chat with some experienced charter Heli pilots who told me how they fly towards home IFR then cancel their IFR clearence and descend into the cloud around London using the GPS as the only approach aid. I understand some pilots will take this down to 300ft and if they don't see the runway, they go around.
As HeliMutt says above - "Weather was probably near minima" - Overcast at 300ft, mist, maybe 2 miles visibility, night ??? What kind of minimums's do charter pilots work with ??
I'll be honest, I've gone from the army where you get the job done, and since then I've been in the nice comfortable world of Police or Offshore where we all have the right to look out the window and say "Nope, not good enough". I shudder to think of the pressure you charter guys must be under and then on top, working single pilot, navigating, handling the radios alone - Its just too much work - Certainly for a numpty like me.
I know people don't want to speculate about this incident and I'll follow suit, but even if this was a technical fault or structural failure, surely we cannot allow operations to continue, where it is legal to fly VRF at night in this sort of weather to a 'green field' site. We lost Mathew Harding and friends, we lost Max Radford with the Yukos boss on board, and now this incident. There has to be a better code of practice, one that gives all charter pilots the same rights that I have to point to a line in a rule book and say, "sorry, it just can't legally be done".