Chinook - Still Hitting Back 3 (Merged)

[walter kennedy]

Tandem Rotor wrote:
<<I should be very grateful if you would be kind enough to point me in the direction of the evidence specifying a radar fix, linked to an accurate time check, when the aircraft left the Belfast CTZ. >>
Well there was another fixed point not so far from the ATC fix that is known accurately (the exact position and the exact time);
due to the lack of confidence at the time in the nav systems with a gps component, they had done what was common practice at the time – they overflew a known feature not long after takeoff and did a fix.
Racal were misleading (in their report) in describing the fix on the waypoint V813 (from memory just now) as the “initialising” or “initialisation” fix;
it was actually the last operator input fix found in the recovered data from the SuperTANS and was not made on the apron at Aldergrove but a couple of miles on their way along the 027 track, and the use of this fix in analysis gave the same result as the ATC fix, dist/time wise;
again, there was some misleading by the ATC witness who described the position as 7 nmiles (all this from memory just now) along the 027 radial from the Belfast VOR – of course this was no where near as anyone has been to Aldergrove could tell you – the apron at Aldergrove is significantly removed from the VOR site – however, they had held 027 mag (at the time) from the apron to the position of waypoint change (near the Mull) and the displacement of the ATC fix did not alter the dist/time calcs significantly.


Yet again a point on this forum illustrates that inadequate analysis by both authorities and interested parties (eg Mull group) leaves understanding of the basics of this crash far short of where it should have been years ago, let alone today.
Further to the analysis aspect, an important deficiency became apparent in the processes of investigation used by the authorities for a politically sensitive crash – that was that civil authorities were overly dependent upon the RAF for information on the aircraft's systems and pertinent operational procedures such that it was apparently easy for the RAF to obfuscate where it wanted equipment and procedures to remain out of the public domain – clearly an interested civil authority needed to have assembled a small team (comprising, say, pilots and civilians with navigation systems backgrounds) prior to an inquiry to better understand the full range of navigation systems available and the evidence with respect to the a/c's navigation, to establish as far as possible what was apparently happening prior to the crash, and to better generate pertinent questions and allow those questions be pressed home in the inquiry – for example, no inquiry could have been regarded as comprehensive without knowledge of the existence and usage of two systems (CPLS and the VHF Homer) capable of aiding local navigation.
That the crash happened in a training area but this was not noticeably emphasised nor considered together with that it was not disclosed that this a/c was fitted with a significant piece of local navigation equipment whose exercise in this area was of obvious merit and whose use analysis predicted must surely be sufficient to justify a new inquiry.