Ah Danny
When has a good old British public inquiry done anything in the way of finding the truth and not just protecting the establishment?
Thanks to yourself, Reggie and Cliff, I have understood some of the pitfalls of the RAF training machine which strangely has just run full circle today. The two junior pilots (and the guy on the jump seat) at Staines were what became known in UK civil aviation terms as "Hamble Mafia". Incredibly stringent selection and 1/3 chopped to produce a generation of Uber Mensch.
Unfortunately it would take a couple of decades to change the old attitudes.
Staines had some of it's origins in the Munich disaster -1958 - where BEA management decided that two recent take off accidents were no concern of their pilots - both were slush covered runways. Incidentally I occasionally commandeered a vehicle to inspect the runway myself if I wasn't convinced of the validity of runway reports (1990s).
The Trident had three reported premature slat retraction and stick shake/push in it's recent history before the Staines accident. The root cause was cowboy lack of adherence to our noise abatement procedures. They were deemed "one offs" and not passed on. We did not have a stick push procedure in our manuals and Keighley and myself were taught to "dump the system" if the push triggers "because it's always faulty".
Some of this came out at the inquiry - mainly from George Childs and "Cat's eyes Cunningham"...the first being an astute line captain concerned with what we had been taught; the second was the Trident's test pilot. Child's testimony exposed "corporate amnesia" and he later resigned as his life became "untenable" in BEA.
Six months before the accident I flew with "slow" Jerry Keighley (P2) from Ostende to Hamble. The rest of our training fleet was grounded due to a virulent cold front across eastern england. I was sitting behind him in the D55 Baron when we hit moderate turbulence - he suggested that he slowed back to Turb. speed but our instructor - Pat Courtney (he left a wingtip on a tree stump during a strafing attack whilst flying a Hurri-bomber) said "no - you only have to worry when the eyeballs bounce and you can't read the instrument panel".
About a minute later we must have hit the cell and Pat wrenched the throttles back, I thought "sh@t I'm going to die", the guy next to me screamed (he's currentlly flying the 787) and Jerry continued flying along the airway through the cell without any problems.
The blame game destroyed his family - His father was shot down during the Battle of Britain whilst on a lone, daylight raid on Berlin in a Whitney. Churchill had decided that if he bombed Berlin the Luftwaffe would take some of their resources from the Pas de Calais and give fighter command a break. As you know it led to the Blitz. Bill Keighley crashed on Texel- spent the next four years in Stalag luft drei and then participated in the death march.
For those of you who didn't live through the 70's it was a time of industrial upheaval - strikes - three day weeks - electricity cuts -IRA bombings - shortages and hoarding not forgetting interest rates of 18%. We were badly paid but worse was the bully boy attitude and the old "if you want a command Sonny".
A group of pilots had been sacked, others were threatened including Jerry's flat mate's captain a few days before his crash - his flat mate had selected Land Flap instead of Flap Up at the cutback point.
A whole group of captains had written to the Board of Trade to get them to do something before we crashed yet another aircraft.
So if someone said jump to me I jumped...and Key, no doubt, flew non standard procedures and probably gave Jerry an order than he misunderstood - his manipulation was never spotted because we had a "quaint" procedure that EVERYONE wrote down a clearance at the SAME time - with no one minding the shop.
Sadly National Geographic recently made a documentary which imho has very little to do with the truth - and that's another story.
I had a great career and am still flying - albeit paragliders - but I couldn't wait to leave BEA which I did - they crashed 8 aircraft in the 6 years I flew for them and if the inquiry had been balanced maybe some of them wouldn't have happened - most were down to the training department - just like the RAF and Meteors, Lancasters, etc.