Chug wrote: <<This is a story of the intentional dismemberment of the airworthiness protection of the UK Military Airfleet. >>
Perhaps this is a pragmatic approach when a complex aircraft is purchased from overseas. Although I do not believe airworthiness was a relevant issue in this crash I thought I would bring you all to reality regarding your endless discussions about it – having worked in a defence industry, I can tell you that the CC/QA (call it what you will) function is hard enough when the kit is manufactured “in house” with the design engineers readily available to the QA guys and that on systems nowhere near as complex as a twin rotor helo – the numbers of QA staff seemed to outweigh the engineers and we had to give them much of our time such an onerous task it is – if you do not build the thing yourself you have very little chance to maintain rigorous, meaningful CC – and apart from keeping you all running around in ever decreasing circles, the airworthiness issue is not going to achieve anything.
In this particular incident the FADEC has drawn much attention – that the engines were found at matched power and that data stored in one of the engine management computers did not record any excessive transients should put this one to bed.
Regarding any other possible control problems, as others have said, they were already very close in when they changed waypoints and made the fatal turn to the right – it was not a control problem that got them into danger and indeed when in the last seconds an evasive manouevre was started the a/c seemed to have responded as expected.
So you are not going to get anywhere with blaming the aircraft – especially with the strong political need at the time to assure the public that sabotage was not an issue as the pilots were at fault beyond any doubt whatsoever – that's why the verdict was so unjustly harsh as, in strict legal terms, it implied just that – had there been any realistic chance of blaming the aircraft to a similar degree of certainty, perhaps the powers that be could have taken that option back then – the case the Mull group has put forward is nothing like enough to get them to change horses now.
Perhaps if you all could have applied your collective wisdom to a constructive analysis we may have progressed somewhat. All that is known about this crash is consistent with them approaching a known landing area but overshooting – if you had followed this argument that I have put on this thread many times with the chartwork, reading and checking Boeing's “Analysis of Available Data”, and visiting the site in various weather conditions perhaps you too could see the obvious. If they had been given an extra task that has not so far been declared then the whole case must be reopened – put your minds to it – what is there to lose?