I have to say that even if you could establish categorically that the briefing officer said that the track went over Erebus, so what?
Whatever was said, the commander of the flight was still under the impression when he took off, that he was on his way down McMurdo Sound.
How did he get that impression if not from other contradictory briefing material? (Let alone the experience of previous commander(s)...)
What really bothers me is that, as far as I understand, whoever changed the flight plan coordinates, did just that.
The spherical trigonometry doesn't stack up. (The Privvy Council ruling mentions this.)
He didn't even generate a new flight plan, merely manually changed a coordinate digit. The tracks are virtually identical, as are the distances. But when you do the trigonometry, the tracks should vary by almost 5 degrees, and the distances by 7 nm (Post #285).
Conceivably, if you're sitting there for 340 nm and your tracking is ~5 degrees out compared to your flight plan, you might start to wonder why? But the crew didn't even get the chance to do that, because for that particular leg, the flight plans now bear no resemblance to what was being flown.
Frankly, for someone in an airline navigation department, thats s**t.
What was the big deal in routing the aircraft via Bryd anyway? It seems the glaringly obvious point to route towards. The US had done all the donkey work for them already...