Regarding Courtney’s posts:
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Funny why you crucify someone who is stating a view that so many would take – shouting down the individual isn’t getting you anywhere.
Face it, the MOD’s version stinks – omitted, selective, and misrepresented evidence together with spin to make the simple case that the pilots were at fault in bad weather.
BUT your version doesn’t offer a damn thing to counter this – you have not used your collective skills and experience to address the many anomalies nor get a consensus from the ample evidence (direct and circumstantial) of what else they may have been tasked with other than passing by the Mull en route.
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While of course the possibility of an aircraft fault should indeed have been investigated thoroughly by independents (not MOD) – and I do admire the efforts of John Blakeley in particular for doing this most thoroughly and professionally – surely it should not be to the exclusion of all else AND it has now consumed an enormous amount of your time and effort and still leaves the 3 problems I have with an a/c fault (very briefly here now, you’ve heard it all before in detail):
(1) No obvious fault found (yes, I do appreciate 8-15’s post #3016 – “Scouring a fully intact airframe for evidence and the cause of a UFCM is difficult enough, but when the aircraft is scattered across a hillside, the problem would be compounded 1000fold”);
(2) Your suggested faults are either highly improbable (e.g. 2 axis jam freeing itself at last second) or demonstrably wrong (e.g. runaway as engines were found matched) in this instance;
(3) Their flight profile was already in trouble where they were and detailed analysis does not suggest control problems got them into that situation nor prevented recovery.
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You have rather gagged debate in the pursuit of the “nothing can be known” strategy – not digging deeper in case something negative is turned up (some confidence in the pilots this shows!) – which, IMHO, serves the authorities very well because my “pet theory” has it that they came unstuck because of the actions of others.
Let us not forget that the security team on board were not in favour of capitulating to terrorism – had they got to their meeting they would have enacted strategies that would have knocked the terrorists for six – and wasted the months of secret talks between London and the IRA – this crash removed this obstacle to the peace process. We owe it to them (not just the pilots) to explore fully any chance that any activity that this a/c was involved in (ad hoc training or whatever) was vulnerable to accidental or willful disruption by a third party – however unlikely or unpalatable.
The evidence suggests:
that they had deliberately turned towards a known landing area for which waypoint A was the inner marker;
they had discarded waypoint A in their nav computer despite it remaining ahead – which suggests the reference to another waypoint in the system;
instrument settings were appropriate for an imminent landing or close pass to ground at the elevation of that area;
they had started to slow down (TAS down 20kts) which put them in a low power regime that would have impeded recovery from an emergency situation (turbine & FADEC response lag);
they were clear of the mist until the last seconds (ground hugging on slopes below orographic cloud) but it would have impaired their judgment of distance off – they would have been totally dependent upon whatever system they were using for this approach;
had their reference been ½ a mile further up the hill than at the landing area, all that is known about this crash is explained.
Now let us start the real debate.