Comment just earlier -- "... interesting and remarkable statement. Why should the radar be unreliable..."
Skepticism --> Maybe not that the 'radar was unreliable.' -- Mostly I filed such cases under the label "CFIT", but many of these could be more accurately filed as "
involving ATC-Crew mis-communication" [read the link at bottom for an exemplar of fatal mis-comm'].
At the time, when nearing McMurdo, check-in & other radio-comm, you quickly felt that things just weren't "normal": McMurdo local controllers weren't the same as at SFO nor Oakland-Oceanic (not FAA, not USAF, nor NZCAA).
But the big ARRIVAL-CFIT training lessons were unmistakable during the 1970's: since the advent of Enhanced-GPWS it might be difficult for todays' pilots & controllers to comprehend that we regularly drove big turbojets into small peaks WHILE IN RADAR CONTACT.
Those "fatals" led to repeated training-sessions for all pilots, and extra training for the annual DeepFreeze. For us, then, a big lesson was that TWA B727 that impacted that tiny hill while on arrival at Washington DC's Dullus Int'l /
1Dec74 (pilot hurrying to get below cloud while descending through a turbulent cloud-layer). Then, for those MAC-pilots, they had the recent lesson of a MAC-crew [with a senior- CHECKAIRMEN professional Navigator] impacting a peak in the Olympic range while descending into McChord (near Tacoma) /
20Mar75:
HistoryLink.org- the Free Online Encyclopedia of Washington State History