Originally Posted by
Graybeard
EAL401 can be argued as an early version of too much reliance on automatics. However, the far less automated SAS DC-8 that hit the water on approach to LAX one night was almost the same. Nobody was flying.
Yeah. I'd say what we're looking at with EAL401 was an early demonstration of why CRM is fundamentally necessary, although in their case there was a lot of "there but for the grace of..." (get-home-itis just before the holidays) and more than a little old-fashioned rotten luck (warning going off with FE in the hell-hole, mismatched computers - not to mention the nose gear light burning out at that precise moment in time).
The Area Nav equipped ANZ DC-10 that hit Mt. Erebus was also rooted in unfounded reliance on automatics. The system had never let them down before. It was beyond their comprehension that a route coder would change the lat/lon of a waypoint without advising the crew.
Well, there was a lot more to that one, with ANZ routinely flouting their own regulations for two years prior to the accident, with the pilots being used to flying a route that had been incorrectly programmed in the INS for a year prior. Basically the Chief Navigator incorrectly entered the waypoint when the computers first arrived, and then corrected the waypoint to match ANZ's documentation without telling anyone the night before the flight. In that time the pilots had become used to flying the "incorrect" route (which in fact more closely aligned with the military route almost all other aircraft took around McMurdo Sound), and so the lore of the crew room was that the "incorrect" route, which did not overfly Erebus directly, was the route they would take. The final piece of that puzzle was the whiteout conditions presenting a false horizon.
I had a long debate with an ex-ANZ pilot on here over the crew's responsibility versus that of the airline - those who know me from the AF447 thread may be surprised that I was arguing the crew were not at fault, and that the change in INS co-ordinates not communicated to the pilots was the overriding cause. He argued that the crew should have never relied on the INS to the degree they did, and should not have flown so low - despite that being considered normal procedure at the time.