This is a very difficult one Courtney. The nav survived. I was flying the F3 on the same base at the time. Indeed, I flew that day and, IIRC, there was a low level haze over the North Sea at the time. The pilot deliberately selected max sweep (so the auto-wing sweep argument is irrelevant, as he would have deliberately over-ridden it) and his reasons for doing this are highly debatable, i.e. we don't know why he did it. I suspected it was because he believed the reduction in both drag (unloaded) and visual signature were more important, and I think it was because these factors were overemphasised in OCU training vs the loss of nose authority (I did the OCU course immediately before that pilot). The nav was, as usually briefed, maintaining tally in the '6' and noticed the decent rate too late for the pilot to avert the accident. The pilot was an ex-Lightning pilot and would have instinctively expected reasonable nose authority at low speed with swept wings. The loss of another ex-lightning pilot in the Red Arrows roll-back accident a few years earlier may be relevant, as a similar expectation of greater nose authority may have caused this accident too.
You may recall I subsequently emphasised the low nose authority of the F3 swept wing/slow speed during the OCU flying controls lecture I gave to you 3 years later, by which time I was the lecturer not the student.
I'm very willing to hear the thoughts of others on this one.
Last edited by Fox3WheresMyBanana; 1st Nov 2013 at 23:38.