Government/MOD response
InFin,
The link to the MOD response which you supplied makes interesting reading and I am a little surprised that it has not been discussed further on this forum.
As the official government response, it is also surprising (not!) how inaccurate and misleading it is. For instance, I have done a little work cross-referring the conclusions reached by the MOD with respect to the Boeing simulation.
Remember the initial fix at Aldergrove (one of the "facts")? Well that was not a radar fix, but a position report i.e. an estimate. And that estimated position was , I am fairly sure, passed to Boeing by the MOD as being 7nm from the VOR rather than 9nm, which I have reason to believe was the correct figure (can anyone substantiate that?). Plugging the correct figures in together with more realistic guestimates of the wind, gives an average airspeed from the initial "fix" to the waypoint change of around 136 kts - so not a high speed cruise at all as suggested by the report.
In another section, the MOD state that Boeing show the helicopter could not have accelerated from 80kts, at the estimated waypoint change position, to the estimated speed at the final flare in the distance available. On the contrary, Boeing show this could have been possible from the hover, let alone 80kts.
I do not suggest the above sheds any new light on what happened, but it does show that the official response is flawed. This was just a small part of the report that I looked into - how much else is wrong?
I am planning to dig around in the old reports some more but would like some clarification on a few other things, so is anyone able to shed any light the following?
1. Is there a record detailing all available r/t transcripts from the flight?
2. Is the Racal SuperTans report publicly available?
3. Was Machrihanish operational/open at the time of the flight?
4. would the chinook have shown on Prestwick radar, or would it have been out of rangeor filtered out?
Apologies if these questions are answered elsewhere on this thread, but I have been unable to find them.