Nunc
An emotive post and many here respect and sympathise with you and, of course, the families.
Having said that, would it be possible for you to clarify your position wrt
Would NVG and/or different lighting have made a difference? Perhaps, maybe probably.
and
to argue that HISL or NVG would have stopped this happening is an exercise in futility and an insult....
Of course nothing is guaranteed, but to me, the 2 phrases are not mutally compatible, I'm afraid.
For the record, I do happen to believe that effective ACL/HISLs would have prevented this accident - along with a number of other actions, of course (eg Radar Vectors/Alt split etc) and HISLs are not the b-all and end-all - but they
do highlight failings in MoD that remain uncorrected to this day.
Nonetheless, I fully agree that this was 'an accident' and a very sad one indeed. However, it can be argued that there is no such thing a 'just an accident' - just unfoseen and unpredicted events - either through things such as lack of information, use of that information or even complacency (and not necessarily by the final operators).
Unfortunately, the fact that there are laid down regulations in the Defence Standards and JSPs indicates that such accidents may have happened before - hence why switching off lights was/is frowned upon by the Def Stans. So, this accident could be construed as a 'predictable outcome' of not having good enough external lighting.
However, the intent of most people here to is prevent recurrence (I would hope) - in my case, to help ensure the airworthiness system (that was meant to prevent such 'predictable' accidents) is, once again, robustly enforced. Indoubtedly, doing this will go some way to preventing recurrence. Having lost a number of colleagues to 'preventable' accidents, I don't believe that aiming to stop any replay of those losses, is in way an insult to the fallen. The less greiving families, the better, I hope you would agree?
sympathetically,
flipster