Chinook - Still Hitting Back 3 (Merged)

[walter kennedy]

What a charade – asking each other questions that will not be answered and which are irrelevant anyway – while ignoring or not having the balls to ask nor answer basic questions on practice, procedures, and equipment. To an outsider there are so many such questions but which appear to be taboo with you lot – for example, the PLS of the time has been superceded by a much more secure system and other NATO countries describe its operational use openly in exercises, yet even for general interest no one here will touch on it with a barge pole – why is it still sensitive/classified 15 years on? - and why, when there is enough circumstantial data to at least warrant its consideration, be bound by restrictions on discussion of such equipment, restrictions dictated by authority which has so obviously wronged the aircrew involved and which also may have so wronged the British public? - is there not a point where the public interest surpasses the dictates of a particular state institution? - and perhaps demands you coming out of you own personal comfort zone?
Get some nuts.
Here's another one: the anomaly of the unusual squawk code found set; when I asked what was seen on secondary radar, there were denials that it would have been covered by secondary radar, several sites being described so as to show that no cover could have been expected WITHOUT MENTIONING Lowther Hill; when I did coverage simulation and found Lowther would have had LOS all the way across, gave examples of an a/c with smaller radar cross section having contact at greater range, and quoted an article by a respectable journo wherein someone reported having seen recordings of ZD576, no one here accepted that there would have been secondary coverage; the nature of the switches to select the SSR code are such that they are not readiliy displaced by impact (the loadie who authored “Chinook” had it that you couldn't move them with a sledge hammer) such that the explanation of their having been in the process of changing the SSR code seemed the only explanation BUT it sure looks like they were surprised by the closure with the terrain and so would not have been preoccupied with changing it. But no disclosure of what type of SSR codes would have been used at the time for exercises were offered to the debate. A European ATC authority described the UK code allocation at the time as being short of special codes and so used ones from the domestic allocation where there was no chance of confusion – 7760 (set in ZD576) had the normal meaning of a domestic flight in the Channel Isles (so no chance of confusion up in Scotland) and also, in several Euro regions, had the meaning “ground transponders, tests, trials” (obvious one to use if you were doing a trial with a system using a transponder on the ground like the PRC112 really, one may have thought, but the only feedback on this was to point out that it was only for a/c flight testing fixed navaids – oh, so that one's dead, I suppose I should assume).
Oh and the one that even Peter Seller's Clouseau character would look foolish overlooking – as the PLS of the time could give precise range and approx bearing, it was regarded operationally in other NATO countries as an accurate point navaid for extraction, etc and so was OK for “tactical approaches” - and ZD576 was using a tactical call sign.
You can lead a horse to water but you can't make it drink, eh?