NoD
Thats a fair point - I used to fly for the mil before becoming a civvy ATCO - one of the things I questioned as soon as I saw the incident for the first time, (and before we 'analysed' it), was why the ATCO did not use a "no compass, no gyro" procedure earlier, as soon as it was apparent that headings were not being flown- something we practiced from both sides of the microphonne extensively in the military.
I suppose as technology 'advances' we lose a lot of the skills we used to have, or we discard them as they are very unlikely to be needed and there are more pressing things that need to be practiced with the advent of new equipment/technology.
If the English spoken by the crew in this incident had been better, there is no doubt in my mind that the incident (from an ATC and an incident management point of view) would have been resolved much earlier and better.
The breakdown of communication was IMHO a major factor in so much that the inability of the crew to communicate, (and/or the inability of the ATCO to understand), the implications caused much more stress on the flight deck than there should have been thus reducing their mental capacity and therefore the fault diagnosis etc.
The fact the aircraft was not keeping to assigned altitudes (within the tolerances required for seperation purposes for ATCOs) was also a worry on a couple of occasions.
You are correct, as ATCOs we would keep other aircraft out of the way - but when you have departures that fly under holding areas it is difficult and often impossible to notice quickly if they are deviating from the SID route or heading - especially when the crew themselves are not aware and thus unable to warn you... it is extremely difficult in the LTMA to de-conflict flights without having a massive knock on effect - as you can imagine, the LOT may have been in conflict with a couple of flights, so they would be given vectors to keep them clear... however because of the confines of airspace, these aircraft themselves then become conflictors for another set of aircraft, and so on!
I think that in situations like these, it wold be far better for the ATCO to take control of navigation and introduce timed turns - there will still be plenty of scope within this procedure for the crew to try to diagnose the fault.
As an aside - there were a lot of other lessons from an ATC point of view to be learned - one of the ATCOs involved made a few assumptions that were not particularly smart - however the incident did turn out OK, and thanks to the way the UK system works, it has provided us with a good lesson learning experience.