Having been hooked on the subject since I saw the TVNZ docudrama on the BBC when I was off sick from school in 1990 (and in fact managed to stretch out my infirmity by an extra day so I could see the final part), as an outside observer there were several forces at play in the aftermath of the accident.
Chippindale was an old-school "by-the-book" pilot of military extraction and post-WWII vintage, and everything he said indicates it was inconceivable to him that anyone other than the Captain should take responsibility for a crash that was caused by anything other than mechanical failure or extreme weather. By all accounts a great pilot and a good man, even if you disagree with his conclusions he should not be vilified for them. His occasionally slightly exotic interpretations of what was said on the CVR are not so easy to defend, but I suspect he genuinely believed that he was right. I wonder if the "handwritten" transcript that bbg's original post refers to might have been his - I distinctly remember that the controversial phrase "Bit thick here, eh Bert?"* was handwritten over the top of the NTSB's "indecipherable" marks at that particular timestamp. The problem with Chippindale's approach is that he was not a line pilot at the time, and he had no reason to believe that ANZ's corporate culture was any less stringent than the military culture he knew well. While later in life he acknowledged that the rules governing the sightseeing flights had not been followed in the past, he seemed to consider those incidents at the discretion of the pilots involved, and looking deeper into it was not warranted.
From what I've read and conversations I've had, in the cut-throat world of aviation in the '70s the truth was that rules were being bent, if not outright ignored, almost routinely. Most of the Kiwis I've spoken to over the years have advanced the opinion that Muldoon was running the country like his own personal fiefdom even as it increased in stature over the years, and as far as he was concerned his mate Morrie [Davis, then-CEO of ANZ] was still the man to run the national flag carrier, having seen it grow from a small operation in the Tasman days to the multi-million dollar operation it had become by the late '70s. A lot of ANZ's pioneer spirit was admirable on the surface, and indeed they followed through on the Antarctic flights to start with - rules were put in place, including the one Chippindale referred to regarding minimum altitudes, and no-one was allowed to command an Antarctic sightseeing flight until they had first been down there for familiarisation. These rules stayed in place for some time, but something went awry between that time and the Collins flight, and an "all mates together" attitude from the top down was not sufficient to stop it happening.
To begin with, the requirement for any commander of an Antarctic flight to first be taken on a familiarisation trip was dropped, whether because of the human tendency to grow complacent as new ventures become routine or more controversially, commercial pressure (ANZ pioneered Antarctic flights, but the larger Australian airlines were beginning to offer similar packages) we can only speculate. The fact remains that even by the '70s, Antarctica was still a risky proposition in aviation terms - sector whiteout was known about, but something rarely experienced on the line and the haste with which aviation in Antarctica went from being something that involved small aircraft loaded with survival gear to fully-laden widebodies with full onboard service and passengers in mufti definitely began to look foolhardy with 20/20 hindsight.
The breakdown in communication between ANZ's Navigation section and flight operations was also something that should not have been tolerated. A culture that allowed the Chief Navigator to make a mistake when programming the navigation computer because he did not perform the third "re-check" of his data is bad enough, but to compound that mistake by correcting it the night before the next flight was due to leave and *not informing operations that he had done so* quite rightly beggars belief, and Mahon was absolutely right to censure both the Chief Navigator and the company that allowed him to do so.
The fallout following the Mahon report is legendary, and the subsequent finding that he had overstepped his bounds - not by explicitly stating his belief that he had been lied to, but by saying that the lies were orchestrated from the top down - was later spun by Muldoon as an exoneration of ANZ and Morrie Davis (which it clearly wasn't). The tragedy there was that the careers of both Mahon and Davis - both pioneers in their field and very capable men - never recovered from these events.
Whether one subscribes to Chippindale's or Mahon's interpretation of the accident (or indeed weigh up the pros and cons of both), the fact remains that ANZ's corporate culture (and aviation safety knowledge globally) received a much-needed overhaul because of the information that Mahon brought to light, and for that the man deserves to be applauded.
* - When Mahon went to Washington with the CVR tapes, an equally credible alternative was "This is Cape Bird", which would completely reverse the conclusions Chippindale drew - but ultimately the equipment was not able at that time to make it any more clear. I wonder what modern audio technology would make of it?
Last edited by DozyWannabe; 28th Nov 2011 at 21:29.