Interesting responses to my question about the difficulty of 0/0 towering take offs. Crab - I agree with you 100%. In my experience, they are quite straightforward when hand flown, obviously with SAS engaged. I'm a bit surprised that not more agree. I learnt and practised them on original (Bristows) IR training, and ongoing practice is actually very easy to achieve - from a sensible area in VMC daylight just climb vertically, only with reference to the instruments. The key to me is getting fully stabilised - with visual reference - in the hover, then implanting that hover AI picture in your mind and maintaining it and heading, as close to max take off power is pulled. I've never used doppler etc but I've never found the acft drifted much, though as a check a max zoomed in route line to a waypoint in take off direction can be used.
I certainly would only want to do this with a good power margin though - the briefer the climb the easier it is and less any drift can occur. I think I recalled the 139 was initially going into Coventry 20 mins away (for fuel?) so it could well have been pretty light, and even if not, I suspect A139 power margin is good with 4 POB.
NRDK - I'm not convinced engaging all appropriate upper modes on a 4 axis is necessarily the best way go here. To be fair I've not flown 4 axis, but I can't help but feel you've got to be a lot cleverer to be absolutely sure the automatics have all been properly set up and then tweaked - and if they haven't, well, that really will stuff you. I'd have more confidence in just maintaining that hover attitude in the climb by hand. A number of accidents have come from over reliance on automatics, and under-practiced hand flying, as we know.
76fan and B Bob - glad you raised night rig departures. No experience but I had assumed that in reality many of these must towering instrument take offs. Surely there are often no visual references at night? And to make it much harder, I'd imagine often at weights giving much smaller power margins than this 139 had.
Lonewolf - you may well be right in that the crew were in too much of a hurry (panic?) to get some fwd speed going and put the nose down too much, and then got disoriented. I suspect they could have been VMC on top (of the fog) at 150ft to make the transitioning job much easier, but even so a 10 deg pitch down is all that it should take - if you've got the power to climb well vertically there's no rush to generate airpeed - and if there is the chance of descending and disorientation with bigger attitude changes are much higher.