The debate about Chippendale / Mahon / The Privvy Council Appeal / Morris has been going on for 25 years - you will not resolve it on this thread. Nobody is probably going to definitively decide it.
Anyway wasn't the point of this thread to just agree that whatever happened, and whoever was responsible and with whatever proportion, the event was an absolute tragedy - especially to a country of it's size, and one that was very close knit?
Family and friends of mine are often surprised at how, like other avaition people, I can dispassionately look at accident reports and photographs and seek information out of them about what went wrong and why. But when I see the photos of Erebus, I still get a shiver up my spine - it is the difference of association I guess, remember what an absolute tragedy it was for NZ and the effect on the psyche of the whole country at the time. It sounds melodramatic, but anyone who lived there at the time I am sure will attest to the enormity of it at the time.
My father worked for the company in flight ops and was working at Mangere that night - we watched the newsreader on NZTV (Dougal Stevenson was it?) reading the fateful newsflash. Living in the western hills of Auckland overlooking the Manakau we were surrounded by ANZ families and it was a tough couple of months leading up to Christmas - as they say everybody in NZ knew someone connected to Erebus - but around our neck of the woods everybody seemed to know a few.
My fathers first story of the night after getting home was the embarassment of seeing the MD Davis stumbling down the escalators at the airport clearly drunk whilst relatives of the families looked on - it was not ANZ's finest hour with respect to
PR. As I recall they had just started up their 'Nobody does it Better' advertising campaign, which was quickly ditched. The
PR campaign got worse when the homes of the operating crew were broken in to and documents removed.
The only comfort I take from the whole tragedy is that for the occupants of ZK-NZP the end looked mercifully swift.
The pain of the families , including around where I lived, was unneccessarily drawn out, and continues to be today, by stupid politics.
It is said that NZ grew up that day - more is the pity. It was to grow up further in the following couple of years witnessing the mire of political manipulation.