Chinook240
I thought I had initially posted appreciation of your kicking off discussion on this topic – I had hoped others would join in to establish the nav/avionics setup that is really a basis for understanding how they got their way around.
Why I pushed for other opinions was to try and get other inputs (developing the picture, as it were) and also a second opinion on what was a surprising difference from other similar systems. As I believe I have said in previous posts, that this option was not available in HC2 Chinooks was an interesting issue in its own right – the 47D had it.
While the Americans publicise procedures rather well (obviously not OPSEC ones) for their own airmen to brush up on, there is very little in the public domain for equivalent UK procedures and systems – hence the need for anyone researching incidents such as this one to ask basic questions on forums such as this.
The hostility towards nav questions on this forum contrasts with the endless banter on airworthiness, weather, and legal points that has so smothered debate – I believe there is enough evidence for a planned, controlled approach to a specific point on the Mull that would clear the pilots’ names (because it has not been acknowledged in prior inquiries that they had had an additional task) and that it would be a shame if the analysis/arguments supporting this were to be derailed because of some minor difference in understanding/use of instruments – let’s clear all this up?
And so I press on:
While I appreciate that such crews on operational flights would have been doing it by the eyeball and map, they had been essentially doing route flying over sea with practically featureless land ahead – the “steer meter” on the Attitude Director Indicator (or whatever you call yours) was driven by compound data that the HP blindly followed while the NHP would have been checking the CDU which had been in GPS mode – one would have thought that simply using the HSI would have been an option requiring less workload on the simple route flying part if this had been an option. (Comment/correction gladly received!)