Please pardon the intrusion with my stray thoughts worth not much more than one penny if that. Seems to me :
Erebus is the god of darkness . In this case a suitably inauspicious name for this very tragic accident.
As the commander is ultimately responsible for the safe conduct of the flight we can say that Captain Collins did fail in this respect.
And he paid for it with his life.
it was not the first time a Captain failed and paid for it with his life. There have been many incidents.
He was however set up for failure with a trap he did not realize until it was too late.
I think it was not prudent to set the waypoint anywhere near flying over Erebus. And it was criminal to not inform the crew.
This was a very highly specialized flight in an extremely remote area with patchy radar coverage in possible extreme weather conditions where at some point very low level flying will commence with probable heavy cloud cover. All parties should have been in agreement the exact plan of action and alternate and a point where the mission should be aborted no questions asked.
This was not what transpired on this mission.
Last edited by armchairpilot94116; 27th Nov 2019 at 18:18.
Reason: Adding