Captain Wilson
Desert Dingo #443:
My question at #442 is, indeed, a trick question. Let’s assume that Capt. Wilson told the pilots that the nav track went directly from Cape Hallett to the NDB at McMurdo Station. To Capt. Wilson, who knows that McMurdo Station is behind Erebus, his statement is the same as saying that the track goes over Erebus. To him, it’s implicit. But if it was implicit, it might not have actually been said. So a pilot who attended the briefing could put his hand on the bible and swear under oath that “Capt. Wilson did not say the nav track went over Erebus”.
When considering the evidence given before the Royal Commission, it is important to take account the procedure under which it was given. Each witness read out from a typewritten statement. The statement was not drafted by the witness. It was drafted by a lawyer. I’m not saying that the lawyers made it all up, but there would be plenty of opportunity to slant the statement in the desired direction. For example, take Capt. Wilson’s evidence. Mahon criticises him for putting in references to “over Erebus” at every opportunity. But it wasn’t Capt. Wilson who actually did that. It was one of AirNZ’s lawyers. My guess is that Capt. Wilson, to his eternal regret, simply went along with it, seeing no harm in emphasising the point.
NZALPA, no doubt, would say that Capt. Wilson was prepared to say whatever AirNZ wanted him to say, and that the truth was irrelevant to him. There are a number of things that should be taken account of in assessing Capt. Wilson’s credibility. Firstly, he doesn’t seem the sort who would commit perjury for a few extra bucks or to help out his mates or to cover his backside. He wasn’t some glue-sniffing street urchin. He was a former RNZAF officer, who served in the Pacific in WWII and who received the Air Force Cross. Secondly, where are extra bucks? Capt. Wilson had already been compulsorily retired from flying, on reaching 55. The job as Route Clearance Officer would have involved a big drop in pay, and, given his age, it would have come to an end in a couple of years in any event. Thirdly, if he lied to help out his mates, then who were his supposed mates? He wasn’t one of Mahon’s “executive pilots”. No doubt he was on friendly terms with several of them, but he would also have been on friendly terms with many of the line pilots. Fourthly, how did Captain Wilson’s evidence assist in covering his backside? He was going to get hammered, wherever he said the nav track went. Fifthly, if Capt. Wilson was the AirNZ lacky that he is alleged to be, why did he add those additional paragraphs to his written statement disclosing that he had verbally authorised descent below FL160 with ATC clearance? As Desert Dingo has pointed out, those paragraphs completely ruined AirNZ’s altitude argument.
But for me, the clincher is the NBD cloudbreak procedure, as set out in the diagram in the link at the end of #443. Just look at the diagram, and ask yourselves whether it suggests an intended waypoint at the NBD, or an intended waypoint 27 miles to the west of the NDB. The obvious intention is to overhead the NDB and descend from that position. And how do you overhead the NDB? By following the nav track. If the intended waypoint was 27 miles away at the end of McMurdo Sound, why would there be the type of cloudbreak procedure shown in the diagram? Far less complicated to simply do a straightline descent from 27 miles out after reaching the waypoint.
Note that of all the line pilots who gave evidence about the briefings, not a single one made any reference to any discussion about how one was supposed to get from the final waypoint to overhead the NDB. The reason, I suggest, was because there was no such discussion, because the issue never arose, because the intended final waypoint and the NDB were one and the same thing.
This accident makes far more sense if Mahon’s conspiracy theories re the waypoint are disregarded. If you do that, and accept that Capt.Wilson believed that the nav track went directly to McMurdo Station, then that’s what he would have said. He certainly would not have said anything inconsistent with that belief. Having just completed an Antartic flight two days before, Capt. Wilson runs off some copies of the flightplan to bring to the briefing, believing that the waypoints on the flightplan represent a nav track direct to McMurdo Sound, over Erebus. He is wrong (hence my earlier reference to him being hammered wherever he said the nav track went). Given Capt. Wilson’s mistake, those photocopies would have been presented to the pilots as “the nav track for your flight”. Capt. Wilson would not have been concerned if he saw the coordinates being noted down, or if one of the photocopies was not returned, because to Capt. Wilson, the flightplan was accurate.
One might ask how Capt. Wilson could have still believed that the nav track was direct to McMurdo Station, over Erebus, when he had just been on an Antartic flight. Assuming he was standing in the cockpit during the final leg to McMurdo, he would have been aware of when the aircraft was in nav mode and he would have noticed that Erebus was left of track. Unfortunately, the flight that Capt. Wilson was on did not go down McMurdo Sound. Instead, it diverted to the alternative route.
Will say something about Capt. S. and others after ploughing through McFarlane’s awful book again. (Am assuming that this is Desert Dingo’s source, rather than the actual transcript.)