Tandem. Thank you for your post on the yacht guy.
RADAR - I am referring to the initial radar trace as they left Aldergrove. It was my understanding they were cleared at 3k and descended to below 1 k after coasting out. However this is a memory buried deep and I cannot find any evidence today that supports that. In hindsight I made the remark as a rather crude tool to support my conclusion that the most probable cause was inadvertent IMC followed by CFIT.
Tandem - what is your view on the suggestion that in the later stages they made a cruise climb because reading the other ST data it seems to infer only that there was simply a clear difference in height by the point of first impact, when calculated against the time base, equated to 1000 fpm at 150 KIAS. However, with a serious double FADEC runaway this height accrual could have occurred in a very short space of time which could have led to inadvertent IMC and CFIT.
A lot of hypothesis but I am inclined to believe this rather than two good pilots simply forgetting where the mountain was and Fying into it in a cruise climb.
Of course if this were the case the crew could be said to have made an error in ending up so close to cloud beyond there VFR limits before the defining event took place. The real environment, as we know, is very difficult to maintain clear dimensional separation from cloud and this could be construed as an honest error. I certainly have ended up in such situations albeit with a machine behaving itself.
Bob, I hope you can now see the relevance of the VFR limits/requirements!