Chinook - Still Hitting Back 3 (Merged)

[Robin Clark]

More on Maps........

I have always had a gut feeling that navigation accuracy played a big part in the crash , whatever other problems there were with the Chinook..........

The waypoint 'A' position has always bothered me.......... and having turned my attention to waypoint 'B' , I have noticed disturbing things here too...............
At first the waypoint 'B' looks like a fairly good choice as it is at a place where the Loch narrows down , and it is actually on waste ground next to a main road at Inchcree...........(ie... possible emergency landing site.)....

.....but there is a larger open space across the water beyond the Corran lighthouse itself ......and ......more significantly..... they could not really overfly this chosen waypoint at low level because it would bring them dangerously close to the 206 metre (675feet) high hill 'Druim na Birlinn'.......just past it on the right-hand-side of the Loch. ..

.....so again it seems unlikely that the waypoint chosen on the map by the crew was actually the point identified by the latitude and longitude co-ordinates found in the Supertans...

If you wanted a waypoint at a place where a canyon narrows , in effect that is what happens at Corran , you would surely place it in the middle somewhere , close the the Corran lighthouse for example..............but in the case of waypoint 'B' , it is off to one side..as though it has been displaced........in fact in the same direction as waypoint 'A' appears to be offset to me......
In this case , I think once is an anomaly , twice is a pattern ......and that the same procedure was used to derive the co-ordinates for waypoints 'A' and 'B' .........

Lots of people have questioned the waypoints 'A' and 'B' ..............more so than the other waypoints , as they are not defined to the same accuracy , or number of decimal places as points 'C' and 'D'. If the crew had the choice of a more accurately defined waypoint , I cannot imagine that they would truncate it , as they would know that the actual waypoint would move.........
...points 'A' and 'B' must always have been defined to the accuracy of the digits found in the Supertans...............which strongly suggests to me that they were derived from a map ............an OS map on the scale 1:50,000 is marked on the map edges in minutes of both latitude and longitude.........


.....so further to my # 6597 on page 330 .............I think the co-ordinates for both waypoints 'A' and 'B' were derived by wrongly reading an OS map ........and they thought they were flying towards a waypoint 'A' which was at least 300 metres out to sea.............

......if my explanation is hard to follow there is a link here to a detailed guide with photos.....

Robin Clark.....