Tornado crash verdict

[Airspeed]

True, Skippy,and hi
I agree with everything that you say.

As I inferred, reports often point to human failing.
The report via BBC says that the fear of flying at that altitude may have contributed.
In my simple world, the pilot directs the aircraft, the WSO looks after the weapons. The weapons did not cause the collision, so how did this man possibly contribute?

Apart from that, the speed of military aircraft hardly allows reaction time for a human pilot who hasn't been warned of an imminent collision. Railway signals allow decision time. The powers that be should think again when they assume that a human can perform as quickly as military hardware, after all, it's designed to take the enemy by surprise. I think this is why the "error" was made; the crew is not jet propelled.

Perhaps the number crunchers could have a few bullet dodging excercises to clarify their decision making. Darwin would suggest that they would soon be replaced with people of better understanding.

Now I've had FOUR bob's worth

[SkippyBing]

Regarding the WSO sortie profiles were chosen that mitigated the effects of his vertigo. Essentially this drove his aircraft to operate in the low level environment.

The contributory factors identified in the report, on the whole, deal with the level of situational awareness of the crew and why they were unaware of the other aircraft. Eg the SSR not being available so the ATC had limited ability to warn the crew. In fact the BBC seem to be distorting the findings by concentrating so much on the pilot error front. It was human error across the piece.

As regards the length of time to fit a CWS to the Tornado, the decision to delay was not necessarily made by a bean counter on a number of occasions it appears to have been a decision, by senior officers, not to prioritise it at the expense of another capability.

[Airspeed]

Thanks for that explanation, Skippy.

I've run out of cash.