Prospector, it appears your favorite investigator screwed up Justice Green's investigation.
Stewart McFarlane, Senior lecturer in Law, University of Auckland (now retired)
http://www.investigatemagazine.com/a...ate_nov_4.html
In 1987 during a claim for compensation by the dependents of the deceased Chippindale asserted that the engineers displayed their mounting alarm by the tone of their voices. Here again the evidence disproves his claim. He also claimed by implication that the voices marked by the Washington team as unidentified were in fact the voices of the engineers. He claimed this despite previously saying “At no time did I attribute any comment to any person. I relied totally upon the recognition of the voices made by the team in Washington.”
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So what did Chippindale actually do in order to create his theory of mounting concern? He took overlapping snatches of different conversations of passengers and cabin crew speaking in the galley area and flight deck and attributed them to the engineers when the Washington team agreed the voices were unidentifiable. He added words to the transcript which the Washington team agreed were unintelligible and suggested they suited his theory that the engineers were expressing their concern about flying conditions to the pilots. He latched onto a few remarks passing between Mulgrew and Moloney. After his theory was disproved by evidence given to the Royal Commission in 1980, he claimed seven years later, contrary to the opinions of seven to nine others, and supported only by Gemmell, that the engineers expressed mounting alarm by their tone of voice.
The conclusion must be that Chippindale’s claims are untrue. The engineers voiced no queries about the proposed descent, expressed no mounting alarm as the flight continued, and expressed no dissatisfaction. Those claims ought not to have been made by an inspector of air accidents. They brought no credit to the Office of Air Accidents Investigation. They were approved for release to the public by the Minister of Transport on 12 June 1980 and are still at the time of writing on the website of that Office’s successor. They have done lasting damage. They must have caused grief over the years to the flight crew’s families. They have created a fantasy scenario of events which supposedly led to the disaster that endures in the public mind to this day as media comments such as Cullen’s, Rudman’s, and Rankin’s bear witness and perpetuates this untrue scenario into history.
Chippindale’s evidence in the court case brought for compensation by the dependents of those killed by the crash against the US Government no doubt contributed to their case failing. He attended in person to give evidence “at the direction of the New Zealand Government”. The US Government paid for his transportation to and from the US.
Ron Chippindale RIP
Obituary: Vale Ron Chippindale: Erebus investigator was one of the many victims of TE 901, the disaster that will not go away
In November 1989, 10 years after the crash of Air New Zealand flight TE 901, chief air accidents investigator
Ron Chippindale admitted to me that he knew Air New Zealand had lied about sightseeing flights to Antarctica not being allowed lower than 16,000 feet. But he’d gone along with that fiction, during his own investigation of that terrible disaster, and all through the long royal commission that followed, at the end of which Justice Peter Mahon accused the airline of concocting “palpably false evidence” and “an orchestrated litany of lies.”
Because of that ringing phrase, Justice Mahon became another victim of Mt Erebus, driven from the Bench for it by his fellow judges and a furious prime minister, Rob Muldoon. But Ron Chippindale was an Erebus victim too, never forgiven by many pilots for obstinately supporting the airline’s lie that TE 901 had no right to be flying below 16,000 feet when he knew otherwise.
But even his 1989 admission did not stop Chippindale continuing to accuse the pilots of causing the crash by bad airmanship. Despite conclusive evidence to the contrary, he still held that they were flying at a low altitude
knowingly uncertain where they were in the hostile, mountainous Antarctic environment. And he bizarrely told me that they could have saved the DC10 and its 237 passengers and 20 crew by sliding it across the icy slopes it hit to a standstill, rather than letting it smash to smithereens after the ground proximity warning system shrieked its awful “Whoop whoop! Pull up!” That would have been a feat of airmanship unparalleled in aviation history.
(more)
http://poneke.wordpress.com/2008/02/13/te901/
If this is true it demolishes Chippindale’s credibility for producing the definitive report of the disaster, as claimed by some on this thread.