If:
- the upshot of all of this is that CASA and the ATSB stick to the line that the only cause of this incident was bad airmanship on the part of the PIC, and
- the basis of that conclusion is that the PIC failed properly to assimilate and make the correct decision in the context of information given to the PIC,
the right thing to do would be get the CVR (if its duration of recording goes back to point at which ‘CASA’ says the information was given to the PIC) to find out the quality and content of the transmissions received.
(I note that even if the proximate cause of the ditching was bad airmanship, it does not excuse the ATSB or CASA from doing nothing about the lifevest and liferaft issue. The silence and inaction on that stuff really makes me sick to the stomach.)
But on the question of the information available to the PIC, let’s continue with the assumption that the PIC received and understood, verbatim, what’s in the transcript.
My reading is that at
0801:31 Nadi makes a transmission addressed to NGA, in these terms:
METAR Norfolk at 0630 Zulu wind 300 09 knots 9999, few 6,000 broken 2400 temperature 21 dewpoint 19 QNH norfolk 1011 remarks closed till 1930 UTC go ahead.
The transcript says that the response from NGA was:
Ahhh ...copy... just say again the issue time for the METAR.
I note that there are no other “Ahhh”s in the transcript quoted above.
Now I’m only a wheelchair-bound geek from Hicksville, and this may be pure speculation, but maybe the crew member who was on the radio felt compelled to respond, so that Nadi knew the transmission had been received, but the “Ahhh” was a verbal ‘head-scratch’ about the “few 6,000 broken 2400” bit. I know that if I were in an aircraft in which that transmission were received by the people with whom I’m fortunate enough to fly, the phrase “few 6,000 broken 2400” in a METAR would produce a ‘WTF?’ moment.
Irrespective of what caused the “Ahhh” and what was going on in the cockpit, at
0802:32 according to the transcript – that’s just
one minute after the METAR quoted above - another transmission was sent to and acknowledged by NGA:
Roger this the latest weather for Norfolk...SPECI... I say again special weather Norfolk at 0800 Zulu... auto I say again auto, alpha uniform tango oscar, wind 290 08 knots, 999 november delta victor, overcast one thousand one hundred , temperature 21, dew point 19, QNH Norfolk 1012...remarks... romeo foxtrot zero zero decimal zero oblique zero zero zero decimal zero go ahead.
So – again assuming all of this has been received word-for-word – on what basis does the pilot get crucified for deciding to continue?
Let’s assume the crew aren’t idiots, and their mutual head scratching resulted in them concluding that the “few 6,000 broken 2400” information may be erroneous, and perhaps instead should be “few 600 broken 2,400”. However, before they ask the question, the SPECI comes through. The SPECI says “overcast one thousand one hundred”.
Is that
really the basis on which this entire mess gets pinned on the PIC? Has ‘CASA’
really decided that that piece of information should have resulted in a diversion?