Sir Rochford Hughes says the crew must accept 10 to 20 percent of the blame for descending without first being picked up by radar and without identifying the high ground: “My great difference of opinion with the judge is that the captain ultimately had full responsibility for the control and navigation of his aircraft. It was a terrible error of judgement coming below safety height without positive radar control.
It doesn't seem like an unreasonable position that the Air Marshall has taken above. I note that at 12.19 the F.O. had been told by MAC centre that within 40miles they could provide radar vectors to let them down to 1500 feet. The F.O. replied to them on HF; "that's acceptable" and the Captain stated that "that's what we want to hear". It's difficult to understand how they got from those statements where it seems to me that they fully intended to have a radar service to instead making a VMC descent with seemingly little discussion about the absence of the radar service. I know the limitations of the various CVR transcriptions, and that there is clearly much context (map reading, pointing out visual features etc) that can't be known from any CVR transcript, but how did such an obvious (to me anyway) intention to have the radar service get set aside so seemingly casually?