Desert Dingo, I take your point, and we’ll never know one way or the other.
However, I do think that any ‘pilot in the street’ would question the ‘likely’ conclusion below on the FE’s ‘I don’t like this’.
If that had been the case the flight engineer would not have stopped issuing warnings until the pilots acted. As this did not occur it strongly suggests a less immediate reason for the comment. It is likely that the duty flight engineer was referring to the exchange between the pilots and was simply expressing his unease that, contrary to expectation, no VHF communications were taking place.
I can’t accept that lack of comms,
alone, prompted the FE’s remark. Why would it? Is it not more likely to have been the trigger - the last straw - in the FE’s increasing discomfort.
As I say, we’ll never know one way or the other. But with 20/20 hindsight, and it’s reasonable to say that the FE wasn’t the only one feeling uneasy, all it would have taken was another crew member to agree, ‘I don’t like it either - lets go’.
Erebus, like the Kennedy assassination, leaves you in no doubt where you were when you heard about it.