The investigator was misguided by traveling to Bendix to learn if Erebus showed up on the Wx radar, where he would get only theoreticals and hedging. He would have had only to interview ANZ and QF pilots who had been there using that exact same radar.
Really? As I understood it, QF took a different route entirely and from the computerisation of the route to the flight before the accident - which would have been for more than a year, remember - all ANZ flights would have followed the incorrect INS track down McMurdo Sound. How would a QF or ANZ pilot have been able to tell him what Erebus looked like on the weather radar when none of them had approached Erebus from that angle?
And prospector, while I haven't read John King's book in its entirety, it would appear from the extracts I have read that it appears a somewhat one-sided account of events.
Also, we'll never know exactly what went on in the cockpit that day due to the limitations of the CVR technology installed at the time, but it would appear that they went below the cloud cover to provide visual confirmation of where they were. The photos and film taken from inside the jet show there were no problems with visibility at all for some time prior to impact, contrary to the theories put forward by ANZ and Chippindale, which suggested they were lost in cloud until the point of impact. As such, King's assertion that
Its unpopularity with the passengers, however, was a likely factor in making Captain Collins more determined to press on to McMurdo when condition were marginal
is thoroughly speculative. And at any rate regardless of weather, the "hard floor" specified by ANZ was routinely flouted by previous flights, and prior to the accident the company was quite happy to distribute material that made that fact clear.