And this;
I think you will find that I repeatedly state in all of my posts that I consider the contributing factors and systemic failures associated with AIR NZ are incontrovertible fact and as you state without the navigation bungle the crash would not have happened. I am just pointing out that you can not alleviate the crew of ALL responsibility either as to do so means that many learnings from this accident will be lost.
I agree there are major flaws with Chippendale's report as even though he identified some relevant issues he totally ignored the part that the company played.
The Mahon review did the total opposite, he identified the company errors and totally disregarded some errors made by the crew.
I personally like to learn from these incidents and have been involved with Safety and Accident investigation for many years for mainly selfish reasons. Because of accidents like this one if I am flying into an airfield or environment with high terrain that I am unfamiliar with I will carry out full procedural arrivals over a visual approach every time even in CAVOK conditions until I have gained some local knowledge as I have read way to many reports of CFIT where a loss of situational awareness of position and terrain lead to loss of life.
I can't hand on heart say that I would have done anything different on the day to the crew onboard TE901, we should be in an industry though that accepts the errors that get made and do our best to learn from them. Having a 'blameless' culture is detrimental to a good safety system as ignored errors are errors that will happen again.
Nailed it again.
(Sorry Ollie, re-formatted in the way I read and thought about it, and a little bit of OCD)