Not being funny or anything ampan, but your premise is increasingly looking like:
Crew do not deserve to be 100% exonerated.
Now how can I make the evidence fit that supposition?
How is that better than what some appear to be suggesting Mahon did?
I believe the system was collectively at fault.
Pilots behaving like sunday afternoon tour operators?
Yeah and an airline facilitating that with super hand-drawn briefing material, a state of the art navigation department that doesn't seem to have even provided the guys at a coalface with a f*****g chart, that wanted to plan them right over the top of an active volcano (some things you just don't need to be told are stupid - its called common sense), let alone document when it changed a route waypoint, a CEO who never wrote anything down, a governmental department that didn't know what the hell was going on either way...
I'd eat my hat if, out of a 100 pilots you sent down there in the same situation, with the same level of polar ops experience, and without the benefit of 25 years ruminations, you'd get a different result with any of them on that day....
I'll bite.
(1) If required to manually enter your waypoints, don't bother checking.
Yeah, but you only check against your paper copy. Or are you suggesting I get a chart out at that stage too?
(2) Don't bother checking your nav track at any stage.
Surely exactly what they were doing. They knew it was safe, so why orbit randomly. Lock back on.
(3) Descend below the height of a known hazard without an independent fix (as long as you're VMC).
So whats the inherent accuracy of my AINS 2200 nm out of Auckland? At Cape Hallet it was good - maybe +/- 2 nm? Erebus is ~25 nm out to my left. Lets orbit right first. Anyhow, I'm VMC out over an ice-shelf so if I see anything I don't like the look of, I'll climb back out north, the way I've come.
(4) Don't bother taking any account of an island that's 4 miles long and 2800 foot high that isn't supposed to be there.
You can't account for something you can't or didn't see. Do you see every significant landmark when you go flying? That said, this is one of the more puzzling questions of the whole episode....
(5) Fly a perfectly-functioning aircraft into the side of mountain.
I don't believe they would have if they'd been where they thought they were. And the reason for that we all know...
Curiously though, what was the plan once they got round the back of Erebus and into the overhead? Or was that left to the remit of the crew based on fuel left in tanks etc etc?
Still reading.