These pilots were very good, unlikely in the extreme to be reckless, and were familiar with that area and low flying in the region and would not have trusted either TANS nor their eyes in those conditions to judge a turn that close in at any kind of speed.
Walter
I agreed with most of that a few posts back. The bit I have a problem with is what the pilots would have trusted to.
If I had been doing this in my old Sea King, I would have relied on my Radar Operator, with a real picture of where the hard stuff was, to keep me away from it. But given that the job was to get 20+ passengers from Aldergrove to Fort George, why would I have been flying precision turns at high speed overland at the Mull when I could just have turned a bit early and headed up the side of Kintyre offshore?
In other words, what you suggest is not plausible because there is no rational explanation as to why the crew was doing it.
There are several plausible explanations as to what actually happened. We will never know which (if any) is correct. But we do know that the Chinook 2 was not certified as fit to fly at the time it crashed. We also know that Boscombe Down had actually grounded the Chinook 2s under their control, for airworthiness reasons, at the time this one crashed. Neither of those statements are conclusive. But both are highly indicative as to the cause of this disaster.
Iain