How many more times?????? There was not/never a met brief, crews started at all times of the day.
I concur. I can't remember ever attending one formal met brief in all the time I was out there on detachment. Crews were required to self brief; we were a 24 hour operation. Due to the inclement weather often prevailing in NI, the usual requirement was to check the information provided at operations, take a deep breath then take off and make an in-flight assessment, using the low / slow advantages of a rotary wing aircraft to find any possible way through poor weather conditions.
I'm afraid Cazatou, you continue to show total ignorance of the way things had to be done by SH; you must have no idea of the pressure crews were placed under to complete a mission. I repeat the word
mission. It was an operational theatre in all respects and by no means unusual to fly in appalling weather; well below normal peacetime VMC limits and well below what your operation would be allowed to fly in. Our job couldn't be done under IFR. Don't forget, we were delivering live armed troops into a terrorist zone. My first job out there (I'll never forget it) was to take troops to clear an area after a civilian had been shot by terrorists in his own back yard. We got there in a 300 foot cloudbase.
Without wanting to drift the thread too far, here's another example to put this in perspective. Some night tasking crews (including my crew, we flew mainly by night) often had to recover to Aldergrove in the early hours of the morning with no chance of a formal IFR recovery and with no chance of reaching a diversion airfield such as Valley due to insufficient fuel capacity for a reserve. The only letdown was an SRE approach and ATC were civvies who often went home before we took off; the civvie side of the airfield was totally closed for the night. I'm not going to let on how we sometimes recovered to the airfield in IMC when the weather was really poor, but let's just say it would make any pilot uncomfortable and a fixed wing aircraft couldn't do it.
Crews had to accept that there had to be an increased level of operational risk and that they might just go home one day in a wooden box; I know I came to accept that. I thought about it every day as I was loading my weapons by the station armoury before going to Squadron Ops; thankfully I kept safe. Some certainly didn't - and I don't just mean this unfortunate Chinook crew. I came away from that theatre somewhat drained and suffering from recurring bad dreams and I was extremely glad to go back to my cosy little fixed wing job on the mainland for a while.
Cazatou, you obviously led a comfortable, highly regulated existence as a VIP fixed wing pilot. You should try to accept that SH had never operated under a framework like the one you had and although I'm well out of date, it probably still doesn't. I must be careful what I say here, but in the NI theatre in my particular role we were sometimes not even being tasked by the normal RAF hierarchy. To put that in perspective, a new OC RAF Aldergrove wanted to come along to see how we operated. Dispensation for a one-off flight was granted but we were not allowed to tell him what we were doing although it must have become obvious to him. He told us afterwards that he was somewhat awe-struck, despite having flown as an operational pilot, as a flight commander and if I'm not mistaken, as a squadron commander IN THAT SAME THEATRE. Think about that, please, before continuing to criticise this unfortunate crew for failing to attend a formal met brief or not eating enough cornflakes from a porcelain bowl in the officer's mess.