No. In that case on a VFR flight you are departing on a flight from A to C or from A to A with the posibility of an in-flight diversion to B should the weather be better than expected.
No. Not an "in-flight diversion to B". That's where your way of looking at it starts getting risky, because by the time you've reached B on the "diversion", you may have used up your diversion fuel. There is, as I have pointed out to you a number of times now, nothing in UK regulation to stop the flight departing for B with C (or A) as an alternate.
To say that you were flying from A to B is to say that you are departing VFR knowing that there is IMC on the chosen route.
Would you recomend that people do that?
We haven't been debating what
I would recommend. We've been debating what is
legal. That said, provided an alternate is properly planned, and moreover that the pilot is prepared to make the decision to divert to it, I can see nothing wrong with departing in those circumstances. Operators do the analogous thing of departing with destination below AOM under IFR every day. Weather is not something that can be predicted with 100% certainty. I'm not going to scratch a perfectly reasonable flight for a "PROB30 TEMPO ...", but I am going to make a contingency plan that leaves me a sensible and safe option if that happens to be the weather I encounter.
I recall a few occasions when I have departed under VFR knowing that there was a good chance that the destination, or some point enroute, would be below VFR. On some of them, I diverted as planned, on others I completed the trip to the intended destination uneventfully.
But this is peripheral. The Exeter to Blackpool flight under discussion was not a marginal case, not one where the crew got caught on the wrong side of a grey line. The reason why it has provoked so much discussion is that to make the flight to an airport that was in fog all day with no suitable navigational equipment and insufficient fuel to divert was not simply "a bad call". It was utter folly. And many of us would like to understand how it happened.