@prospector - You're skirting around the main issue here which was that the Appeals Court did not find anything substantively wrong with Mahon's findings, *other* than his assertion that the inaccuracies presented to him were part of a co-ordinated effort, and they overturned the costs for that reason and that reason alone. I wonder if the Privy Council would have felt differently had they known of the blatant conflict of interest within the Appeals Court panel.
EDIT :
The section relating to the NZCA's limits versus the dispensation is Mahon, page 17-18 section 40(b). It was the airline who gave the dispensation as part of the briefing, and I think it reasonable to assume that the contradiction between the airline's operating procedure and what NZCA had originally specified in 1977 would not have been covered in the briefing. Had this been clear in the Chippindale report, it could have caused difficult questions to be asked of ANZ (for contradicting the regulation in the first place), and of the NZCA (for not effectively regulating the national airline by letting the dispensation stay unchallenged for 2 years).
Last edited by DozyWannabe; 8th Dec 2011 at 21:48.