Prospector, while on the one hand you seem to agree that there are two points of view on this accident you don’t seem so willing to accept an entitlement to hold the other point of view. Worse, you seem to be to be quite selective, if not cavalier, in your presentation of information. For example, in one of your first posts you say:
You would appear to belong to the school that supports Mahons statement that the aircraft "was programmed to fly into the mountain from the time it left (NZ)".
I believe that this is a subtly pejorative representation of what was said. There is no hope of anything other than endless pointless argument if you don’t do your best to present such comments in as accurate and balanced a fashion as possible. Here are the actual words from Mr Justice Mahon’s report:
393. In my opinion therefore, the single dominant and effective cause of the disaster was the mistake by those airline officials who programmed the aircraft to fly directly at Mt. Erebus and omitted to tell the aircrew. That mistake is directly attributable, not so much to the persons who made it, but to the incompetent administrative airline procedures which made the mistake possible.
It is a matter of fact that the key elements of this finding – the change of waypoint co-ordinates and the failure to tell the aircrew – are correct (for the unfamiliar, the waypoints were not loaded one by one by the crew). Of course the argument moves on from there to why the crew were where they were, etc. etc. … and it goes on and on and on thereafter with supporters of each side of the argument selecting bits of information to support their point of view.
May I also make the point that your reference to the “Orchestrated litany of lies” is also misleading? It was subsequently found that the evidence did not support the use of the word “orchestrated” (and I have no argument with this finding). However, what you seem to miss is that Mr. Justice Mahon was fully entitled to conclude that some witnesses had been less than truthful and that this finding was
not overturned. The evidence for this finding in his report is (tellingly) supplemented by the account in his book “Verdict on Erebus” where he lays out exactly why and how he slowly turned from one point of view to another. Working from memory, a key reason for that change was the behaviour and evidence of certain witnesses.
I am familiar enough with the two points of view in this accident to know that any argument will go on endlessly, so I’ll let it go with an appeal for less strident approach towards those of us who disagree with you.