Veeany, yes thanks for that. I was in the process of re-reading the report. Having re-read it he may have elected to do a "direct to", albeit at a very late stage, as JJ said. Perhaps the visual cue of the ground lights was so strong that the GPS was disbelieved during the initial descent.
Helimutt, your input isn't wasted.
However, someone in UK seems happy to fly an R-44 in solid cloud, or did in the not too distant past. I saw him go by in cloud about a hundred feet or less beneath me. I was in cloud to the northwest of Elstree at 2400 feet, on a day when the local cloudbase was about 1200 feet. Presumably he chose not to use mode C or obtain a radar service that day as it would have alerted ATC to the fact that he was undoubtedly in solid IMC. He was probably out of Denham (that's where his mode A appeared on the TCAS and from where Heathrow spotted him) and was heading northeast. If there's a next time I'll report it to the CAA; in retrospect I should have done so at the time.
Last edited by ShyTorque; 16th Nov 2008 at 20:07.