Tigs2
The Boeing report I recommend you peruse breaks down the calculations so that you can do them yourself - check 'em. Anyway, the (slowing) speed is just one of many parameters that point to their heading for that landing area.
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RE the new inquiry - I have made the point in the past that the way that the pilots were blamed was such that for many politicians and much of the general public there would have been no doubt that it was a simple case of pilot error.
This would have been convenient at the time to prevent possible trouble in NI as a reaction to a perceived (rightly or wrongly) dirty trick.
While it may well be long enough ago now for this to no longer be a valid concern, the question remains that if the pilots were not so clearly to blame, has enough been done to establish what actually happened, bearing in mind that perhaps there was more that could have been looked at beyond the possibility of pilot error and to be sure that there was no opportunity for, say, any extra activity to have been accidentally or wilfully manipulated to cause the crash.
Put again, could the MOD have any other information about this flight that was, perhaps, sensitive at the time and thought to have been not in the public interest to make widely known as the pilots were to blame anyway?
Can we still try and get the full story (all those unanswered anomalies)?
You see, while it would be a great achievement in its own right, clearing the pilots’ names without exploring fully any chance of someone else’s culpability is still denying full justice to them, the security forces onboard, and the British people.