Originally Posted by
ampan
The captain would have left the briefing thinking that the track would be down the Sound to Mac Station.
I respectfully disagree - you're assuming that what what the pilots briefed by Wilson came away with was what he thought he was saying to them, and yet we have that list in the Mahon report that had the majority of the surviving pilots coming out of the briefing thinking they were going down McMurdo Sound (which means that the NDB as a fix was out, because the track from Hallett to the NDB went straight over Cape Bird), with the remainder unsure.
[EDIT - A more visual description of the three tracks (TACAN, NDB, Dailey Islands) can be seen here : ]
At least Wilson was honest about verbally overriding the MSAs at the inquiry - though I don't think Morrie Davis would have thanked him for it.*
At the end of the day there are always going to be differences of opinion, especially where pilots are concerned - because generally being conscientious, professional types - the tendency is to hope that they would pick up on the kind of insidious lowering of safety margins that occurred in this case and would find the right combination of actions to get around it - unfortunately history shows that's not always the case.
Framer makes a good point about MSAs, but in this case they had been specifically briefed that the MSAs didn't apply if a certain set of conditions were met, and in this case - even though the weather wasn't the best it had been in the past - those conditions were met. One could argue that the memo regarding the NDB withdrawal should have immediately caused that verbal dispensation to be struck from the briefing, but it was not.
My opinion that the flight crew should not hold any blame for what happened is formed not because I exclusively agree with Mahon or Vette over everything, nor do I think that Chippindale's technical investigative work was particularly flawed (other than the CVR/FDR transcription methodology - but to be fair he'd never done it before and should be given the benefit of the doubt) - it's simply based on the idea of how much could reasonably be expected of line pilots in an organisation which had such severe communications problems bubbling under the surface. As far as they were aware, the nav section had prepared a flight plan which, while not strictly adhering to the briefing materials, had nevertheless worked flawlessly for 14 months. Collins (and possibly Cassin too) had gone a step further and manually cross-checked and re-checked that flight plan, stuck to what they were told in the briefing in terms of MSA and trusted that it would keep them out of trouble. Did they do everything they were physically or mentally capable of? Possibly not. Did they do everything that could reasonably be expected of them? I think so.
[* -There's an interview with Vette where he describes being summoned to Davis's office following his testimony - he asked if Davis had brought his sword because he presumed he was goingto cut his stripes off, Davis's response being "I'm going to cut your f*****g b******s off!".]