Bob Thomson's comments that this crew thought "they were on a Sunday drive".
All the crews thought they were out for a Sunday drive. See Chippendales comment re no one checking the INS against topographical information. Took 14 months for some one to wake up.
As the US said, being able to provide radar monitoring was “absurd”.
From where did you glean that information??
Do keep up
prospector. It was given in evidence by one of the controllers.
it was well capable of monitoring the approved descent as promulgated to this crew prior to departure.
Absolute nonsense. See comment from the controller, "absurd" he said.
The weather report they received was well below condition required for any descent
I don't know if you are being purposely thick (comprehension again?). I was not referring to Collins, I was talking of ANY FLIGHT, I wrote,
They were never able to fly the cloudbreak procedure in IMC when the NDB was available, for the simple reason they wouldn’t have the RADAR monitoring that was demanded.
Now please advise how you think any descent was justified,?
Reread what I wrote about VMC and think about it for a moment.
Descent below the LSALT of FL160 had to be made in VMC as you say. What advantages accrue from specifying the VMC descent to be made in the stipulated sector overhead McMurdo? Assuming the descent was made in the sector and did not go below 6,000 what weather parameters ruled operations from that point on? 7,000 foot overcast permissible? At no time were the operations immune from whiteout, the point of impact would just be 4,500 feet higher, that’s all. It matters not in the scheme of things (to my mind) where the descent is made if being made in VMC conditions. And there is no evidence that the aircraft was in anything but VMC from FL160 right up to the point of collision. The argument that the other aircraft had gin clear conditions is moot, VMC is VMC, you either are or you aren’t. The only problem being the crews had no business to be tooling around in VMC due to a complete lack of both experience and training. Had the flights continued in the manner in which they were being conducted it was just a matter of time before someone stubbed their toe. And it would not have been the crews fault, however much the apologists for management duck and weave.
With VMC flight we can imagine the aircraft as being at the centre of a bubble or sterile area, that is, a minimum height above ground or cloud, a minimum height below cloud, and a minimum distance horizontally from cloud or ground. All of that is achieved by estimation with the Mk. 1 Mod. 0 eyeball (the V in VMC). That pre-supposes that you do not need to know where you are, since any obstacle, it is assumed, will be seen. Normal obscuration’s to our vision are caused by such phenomena as smoke, dust, mist, fog, cloud or precipitation. Both the cause and degree of obscuration is easily discernible. That is a pilots real world experience, but there are always exceptions and caveats. The exception and caveat in this case is EXCEPT IN POLAR REGIONS. Mention has been made that other flights were made on gin clear days. Maybe so, but even in such conditions you may still very well fall afoul of the tricks of light and depth perception unique to polar operations. There is good reason the US military, in their wisdom, required crewmembers to have made three familiarisation flights to the ice before embarking on the adventure themselves.
Had marginal VMC been available at McMurdo they would have been permitted to descend, and could quite possibly, given the nature of whiteout, be confronted with exactly the same problem that caught Collins. Better to be dead doing something the airline considered legal, heh? The crews knew nothing about whiteout. As has been said, tooling about in a jet at low level in what is only just legal VMC is a bad, bad, bad, VERY BAD idea. The airline just didn't know about it though.
Could someone please remind me again as to what ICAO says the PIC is responsible for? Some people here seem to have forgotten (or never learned....)
And some are ignorant of the causal chain that leads to accidents.