Has the CAA really pulled IRs?
What do you have to do to get it back?
His approach may have been a shambles..... however, ask yourself.....
If you flew a shambles of an NDB/DME approach, which you managed to sort out and stabilise towards the end, then couldn't make contact with the tower, then became visual at 600ft, would you land or go around?
I'd land. Call this continuation bias if you like, call it inexperience, call it failure to diagnose the mis-dialled frequency, call it any of the things that the AAIB report goes on about. But in that situation my priority would be to get the aircraft and my passengers safely on the deck. I would not fancy climbing back up into the muck to try another NDB/DME approach without comms, especially if I'd just demonstrated to myself that I wasn't exactly tip-top at flying such approaches.
In the pilot's mind, the situation when he can't get hold of the tower is something approaching an emergency. He's flying a difficult approach, he doesn't have the capacity to set a transponder code or diagnose the radio problem. Aviate, navigate, communicate. He only has capacity to aviate, so that's what he does.
Assuming, of course, that we believe him when he says he didn't see the Q400. I think this is totally plausible - it's a similar colour to the runway surface beneath it and he's not looking at the starter extension, he's looking at the touchdown zone. On very short final, it probably disappears beneath the nose.
Either his lawyer wasn't very good, or there is more to this that we're not hearing about. What is obvious though, is that he was out of his depth, and he doesn't win any brownie points for this.
Just a minor contribution...
Looking at the approach plates for EGBB, the NDB approaches are offset by a few degrees.
Looking at his lateral track which is (in the later stages) a very straight line, on the runway centreline, it's obvious this is not a hand flown NDB approach. It is autopilot-coupled and was probably flown with a GPS in the OBS mode and with the course pointer set to the runway heading.
Had this been flown on the ADF, he would have been doing well to be within 20 degrees!
The vertical profile is pretty bad, but he salvaged it at the end.
