Originally Posted by
PapaHotel6
......... which is utterly irrelevant. Mahon made a big deal of this, arguing that Collins was simply too amazing a pilot to be ABLE to make the basic errors of airmanship that were being alleged. Well, history is full of amazing pilots who committed catastrophic errors. Jacob van Zanten wasn't renowned for taking off without clearance until he did so at Tenerife.
None of what went before matters. Doesn't matter how respected he was by his flight attendants, whether he used to be fanatical about his kids life jackets, whether he looked dashing in his pilot's uniform. All that matter is what he actually DID on that day. Was he capable of making simple errors? Absolutely. We all are.
Sorry, but it's not irrelevant. Yes we can all make small errors with gargantuan consequences, it is not irrelevant because he was so methodical. This led to an effort to not just say "Well, he made an error" but to ask "WHY" he was led to make the error, what was the environmental and organisational factors that otherwise might not have led him to make such an error... and if the company was so goddam, star-spangled wonderful and the cause was so clear cut, then why the shredding of documents, the alleged removal of pages from the binder, why the burglary at the Collins' home... yes, we don't know who it was, but who is low enough to break into the family home of a woman who has become a widow, not to steal anything of value in the normal sense but to rummage through and remove papers related to the late Captain.
"All of which is irrelevant" Give me a break... the obfuscation, the lying and the highly suspicious shredding of documents and the alleged removal of pages from a binder (not by Mahon but by a member of the NZ Police who came forward when he became aware). All of it points to covering a-ses and once again, Mahon stated the "single dominant cause". If you think people operate in a vacuum then that might be relevant to NASA but the environmental and organisational factors cannot be simply removed from this event, it's precisely because it was unbelievable that someone like Collins would openly break the rules that it bore closer examination and the events that followed more than amply support the contention that there was more to it than appeared. Other Captains had descended below the minimum, why would that be when they would not dream of doing so in other circumstances??? As for the KLM Captain, he was known to be arrogant and demanding, not something Collins was known for.
Of course the Captain wouldn't have flown into a mountain or chosen to fly the aeroplane the way he did on the day, if he had known where he REALLY was not some fictional position he was briefed on. The error set the scene and then the whiteout and the other factors overlaid made not for a fateful decision, but for what might be (or had been on other flights) a routine decision being made in circumstances the Captain and the Crew were wholly unaware of.