This thread has many sub-threads, some technical, some political. Given Brian's comments:
"You don't need to be an Air Marshal to realise that Absolutely No Doubt Whatsoever means Absolutely No Doubt Whatsoever."
and
"The Campaign's point is that you cannot say why they ended up where they did with absolutely no doubt whatsoever."
I am left with a political view:
The Mount Erebus disaster occurred in 1979 and supplied new thinking on how correct investigations could lead to higher standards of safety. The general statement given to the press following most disasters gave ‘pilot error’ as the cause.
A Commission was set up to assuage public uneasiness and the rising anger felt by the airline pilots investigating team and next-of-kin of the crew members. The Inquiry under the auspices of Justice Mahon, and assisted by barristers, David Baragwanath and Gary Harrison, was meant to ‘rubberstamp’ this view. This case changed that. They found the ‘probable cause’ theory untenable.
The Chief Inspector of Air Accidents had left no room for manoeuvre. His verdict was pilot error. However, evidence pointed to a computer error programmed into the system. (A mistake that continues to be made.) However, the Chief Inspector, who had no expertise in the piloting or navigation of sophisticated jet airlines, relied on verbal hearsay. He kept his own view that the “probable cause” was due to flying in cloud, and pilot error. The airline received virtually no criticism.
Captain Gordon Vette put on one side the Chief Inspector’s “honest but misconceived opinion.” He sought to find the scientific evidence behind the disaster. Thus it was that Vette started out on the quest which is described so vividly in his book, Impact Erebus, and which was to make him so unpopular with the Chief Inspector and with the Company Management.
During the enquiry the Chief Inspector’s views gradually came to be discarded by everyone except Air New Zealand and his own employers. Justice Mahon also said that, “after all the evidence was concluded counsel for Air New Zealand, in their lengthy final submissions did not attempt to support the Chief Inspector’s opinion as to causation.
Justice Mahon criticised the Regulator, the police and the airline. Finally, “the Mahon Report put the blame squarely on the airline.”
Justice Mahon also ordered the airline to pay $150,000 as a contribution to the public cost of the inquiry. The company had failed to ‘put all its cards on the table’, he said. It had denied every allegation of fault and had counter-attacked by ascribing total culpability to the crew, against whom it made the untenable allegations that there were no less than 13 separate varieties of pilot error.
Justice Mahon went on to say (in a video) that, “in this case the palpably false sections of evidence which I heard could not be the result of mistake, or faulty recollection. They originated, I am compelled to say, in a pre-determined plan of deception. They were clearly part of an attempt to conceal a series of disastrous administrative blunders and so, in regard to particular items of evidence to which I have referred, I am forced reluctantly to say that I had to listen to an orchestrated litany of lies.”
Also, “That type of situation always makes an enquiry complex where some disaster or scandal involving some Government agency and the procedure adopted by some Governments, the United Kingdom in particular, is to set up such an enquiry, then wait to see what the findings are. If the findings are in favour of the government, it warmly supports the report, if on the other hand the findings implicate some government agency, then the tendency is for the government of the day to reject the report and they will say that it is wrong. This does not happen in Australia of course, but in England and New Zealand, such an approach is in accordance with the hallowed traditions of the Westminster style of government.”
Excerpt from 'Civil Aviation; Civil War' by Christine Standing
“When will they ever learn?” words from a 60s protest song.