We will never know because AH can't remember anything.
Exactly, terry holloway, and if it does suddenly "come back" to him we would never know whether it is a genuine memory or a constructed memory. Neither will he. It's what the brain does when subjected to large mental and physical stimuli which no doubt his did in considerable measure.
There are some other parts of this report that I find strange:
At the apex of the manoeuvre the altimeter would have indicated that the
aircraft was approximately 800 ft below the minimum height that the pilot
stated was required.
Why "would have"? We were told that the GoPro could see the altimeter. The report might have said "should have" or just "indicated". We are not told what the conditional tense is for. The report does state that the GoPro had poor performance when inverted:
They captured the airspeed indicator and altimeter on both days but also suffered the same image contrast problems as the G-BXFI cockpit imagery when the
aircraft was inverted.
However since the 'conclusion' of the report was too low too slow I would have expected more of an explanation. At which stage of the manoeuvre did the contrast problem occur? Very imprecise wording in my view. Lawyers rubbing their hands with glee, I suppose?
How about this:
The organiser of the flying display indicated that it had selected the FDD for his “significant experience in running air displays and his wide recognition within the air display
community”
Since nobody had accused the FDD of flying into the ground or even flying the a/c, what's that about? Attitude (mental)? To my way of thinking that doesn't live in an accident report, at least not with that wording.
The accident flight
On the day of the accident the pilot was scheduled to carry out his sequence
of aerobatic manoeuvres in the Hawker Hunter aircraft at the Royal Air Force
Association (RAFA) Airshow at Shoreham Airport in Sussex. He had flown his
light aircraft to North Weald Airfield in Essex where the Hunter was based.
Given that the pilot has retrograde amnesia, that quote helps get into his frame of mind. He loves flying. Pilots do. So he has a joyride to North Weald doing what is his profession and his hobby. If he'd been feeling bad he'd have phoned the FDD.
Terry, you asked:
If one is looking to be critical of "human factors ", the downwind take off also raises a question mark. What was that all about and was that part of "the brief"
The aircraft departed at 1204 hrs. The takeoff run was longer than usual due to
the high air temperature and tailwind, and the pilot raised the nose of the aircraft
to begin the lift-off at 112 KIAS instead of the 120 KIAS he would use normally.
Once airborne, the aircraft flew towards the south coast east of Shoreham.
The AAIB is not clear on this. If the airfield was active he'd have been instructed which runway to use. We don't seem to be told why the pilot used the downwind but 14kt tailwind is trivial. When the a/c wants to unstick it does. To me that suggests the pilot was comfortable in his seat, and relaxed. At smaller airfields it's not uncommon for the controller to offer a choice of direction if there is no conflicting. It might have been as simple as taxi-time or sun in the eyes. Someone should have asked the tower. But anyway, the t/o wasn't the problem.
and noting that he needed to pull it off the runway at a lower speed than normal.
The pilot had obviously done his arithmetic. Nobody would take off without doing the sums. Obviously he did the sums and his sums were right. He became airborne without incident. With older a/c one tries to minimise tyre wear because tyres are as costly as fuel. As an (ex) owner-operator-pilot that was always present in my thoughts.