Arkroyal
When you wrote
<<If you are suggesting that the crew were actually intending to rely on TANS to take them in IMC to an accuracy of 500 yds within 200ft of terrain then you are indeed suggesting reckless folly and gross negligence.
I find such a plan quite incredible. Ludicrous. >>
you were not just making an important, indeed fundamental point – your phraseology described it so well.
Reinforcing what you wrote, let us not forget that Flt Lt Tapper (acknowledged as a nav systems expert) had misgivings about the accuracy of the SuperTANS and had given his opinion to others in his flight, had he not?
I would like to extend it by saying that, with the slight angle (20 deg or so) at which they were closing with the shoreline, they were already within a few hundred yards of that coast by the position where they changed the waypoint; this waypoint change dumped the only useful reference in the SuperTANS for their immediate situation; it left them with a heading to Corran that gave a track over even higher ground than they crashed into.
Given the conditions ahead, to the right, and (probably) above, their conduct would appear extraordinary – ludicrous, as you so rightly say – and their having the luxury of changing that waypoint suggests surely that they had no desperate problems at that point (the matched power of the engines reinforces the picture of no control problems).
Having some confidence in the abilities and intelligence of the pilots, I personally cannot imagine them having got into that situation without having some other external reference that they believed reliable – it would have had to have been something in the immediate vicinity and intrinsically accurate. That's why I have suggested what I did.
KG86
<<The conspiracy theorists speculate on the fact that this was the top echelon of the Province's counter terrorist officers being flown by a Chinook SF crew. I can tell you that it was purely coincidental that a SF crew was on duty that day. The very same task was flown by a Chinook the year before with an 'ordinary' crew. >>
It was only the expedite and “absolutely no doubt whatsoever” blame on the pilots that prevented a large number of people becoming “conspiracy theorists”.
To me, it did not matter who was flying it – the concern to me was that they were all bundled into a single aircraft which crashed. When the same task was flown a year earlier, the team on board at that time would not have been seen as an obstacle to the peace process as this team was by those who had been holding secret talks with the IRA in the months leading up to the crash.
By the way, you and the other poster who are so adamant that there was no plan to land on the Mull – I thought there was a shortage of people that had intimate knowledge of their actual flight plan? This came out clearly in the FAI during the duty hours deliberations. Did you realise that even a momentory touch down on the mainland released them from the constraints of duty hours in the operational area? - and the Mull was just within their allowed time remaining.