Happy to be Corrected
BastOn,
I am happy to be corrected, especially as the rest of your new post reinforces the point that I and others are trying to make. If indeed Walter's theory were to be correct and they were making an approach to the Mull for a trial, for which they would have been authorised, it was a major failure of the BoI not to recognise this. If having been authorised for such a trial they had pressed on into bad weather then as a minimum pilot error could have been involved - indeed it is my understanding that at the time of the BoI, for whatever the thinking was, the families were told that there could be a verdict of "balance of probabilities pilot error".
I don't think they were conducting such a trial since I cannot believe that on the operations side the BoI would have failed to find this out (the engineering side is a completely different matter) and again if they intended to approach the Mull landing site why did they change waypoints? The BoI of course in the end did not come up with a pilot error verdict since, rightly, they did not have enough evidence to support this, and I would question even their "error of judgement" comment since all the evidence points to the fact that the last thing the crew intended to do, either in their flight planning or in the last moments leading to the waypoint change, was to attempt to climb over Mull. To remind you:
The Board was unable to positively determine the sequence of events leading up to the accident, and therefore concluded that although it is likely that Flt Lt TAPPER made an Error of Judgement in the conduct of the attempted climb over the Mull of Kintyre, it would be incorrect to criticise him for human failings based on the available evidence.
However, the bottom line and the point you make is that even if a pilot error verdict could be supported with facts (not speculation as I see JP repeats yet again in his latest post where he again refuses to recognise that issues which question the airworthiness of the aircraft could also have affected the crew's ability to fly it on the planned and safe flight path) this is a long way from the finding of criminal irresponsbility that the Gross Negligence verdict (based on ignoring the rules and even wilder speculation) means. That, and not speculation on either the operations or engineering side as to the cause of this accident, is, I believe, what this thread is about.
JB