Ye Gods. Maybe my faith in aviation integrity is not so restored after all. Well, I managed to stay away 2 days.....
compressor stall wrote:
They were almost certainly VMC when the hit the hill.
No. They weren't. Because they hit the hill. The question is, did they
think they were VMC? Well that would depend on Vette's theory of them "seeing" a convincing false horizon (horizon visibility is one of the requirements for VMC as I recall) being correct.
Also were they VMC at 2000'? If so, why descend to 1500'?
And VMC all the way down from 16000' to 2000'? In spite of cloud everywhere, sufficient to block Erebus from 13000' down, and Mulgrew's comment "I can't see very much at the moment"? Yes, it's possible that VFR requirements were met the entire time during the descent. But I don't believe it's likely.
Trying to pin the blame on descent to 1500 feet is a distraction. They would have likely hit the mountain at 6000 on the same track.
Um - no. Firstly, speculation about what might or might not have happened at another altitude below MSA is irrelevant. Secondly, with every foot one drops below MSA, the chance of colliding with terrain increases. There is one hell of a lot of Ross Island that is higher than 1500', and slightly less that is higher than 2000' etc. etc.
Through experience, I know a something about flying in the area. If using this first hand knowledge and experience shows flaws in people’s arguments, subsequently causing them to pack up and go home, so be it, but seeing them leave is not what I set out to do
People are leaving because of bad behaviour, not because of flaws in arguments. For example I don't even read 3-Holer's posts anymore; he's barely made an argument or responded to a question in any of his (many) posts and saying things like "we established Mahon was 100% correct" is immature at best, pernicious at worst.
As I said on the previous page, I think the argument that Collins could reasonably have been expected to have made better decisions was won some time ago. Much of what we seem to be doing now is playing with semantics and where there is actual collegial debate (getting rare) it is more towards establishing relative degrees of blame which is something I personally have no interest in doing.