Originally Posted by
prospector
Come now, does that answer my question??, VHF contact was well before 4 minutres prior to impact.
I've been thinking about that - do we know that the erased 4 minutes were the 4 minutes right before impact? I'd have to look it up.
That return was only for a very short time span, the controller may not have even been looking at the seceen, after all that was the only inbound flight and the Captain had requested, and been given a VMC descent. It would not be incumbent on the controller to say anything, let alone question a Captain whether he knew he was VMC or not.
Maybe, but given that the call for VMC was incumbent upon a radar ID before the controller cleared it the sensible thing to do would be to keep tabs on them for as long as possible. I'm pretty sure there was at least one other flight in the vicinity at some point though because the pilot was interviewed by the news team that went down there IIRC.
Still - it wasn't that busy. What else did the radar guys have to do but keep an eye on things?
No not really, more like forty years flying and now, still alive, enjoying retirement. And your strong opinions backing Mahon are based on what aviation experience??
Consider yourself fortunate then - there are plenty of good pilots no longer with us through either a momentary slip-up or even through no fault of their own, just bad luck. Was your experience purely military/GA/training or did you fly the line at some point?
I'm happy to admit that I'm no professional aviator, my experience being limited to my Air Cadet days and getting the odd go in a light aircraft. However I've been an aviation enthusiast and self-taught safety freak since you could count the years I'd been around on two hands - I blame watching "A Fall From Grace" on the BBC when I was eight.
My opinions, which tend towards Mahon's side of the argument - but do not discount anything out of hand as a rule - come less from the aviation side of things, and more from the systems analysis theory I learned as a Software Engineering undergraduate. From my own learning I cottoned on to the fact that accident analysis lines up very closely with the things I learned, and that what applies in systems failure analysis as regards technology can also apply to human-dependent systems, like the one used in ANZ's nav/ops/flight crew communications. I went into some very long and dull detail about "organisational entropy" a few posts back, and if you didn't read it I'd be very pleased if you would and let me know what you think.
As I've said, Chippindale's technical investigation was for the most part pretty good if you judge by the standards of accident investigation in the '70s. However, if his report became the one defining document of the event then a lot of things we now know because of the Mahon report would in all likelihood have been learned the hard way later, probably with greater loss of life. The reason for this is because it was artificially constrained to the piloting aspect, leaving the organisational problems as a footnote. My personal opinion is that this was because he was prevented from digging too much deeper because the conclusions he set out to prove were exactly what his employer and the national flag carrier wanted. As an undoubtedly competent engineering pilot in his military days, it's only natural that his investigation would take that path, but his lack of experience in line operations meant that some of his conclusions were based on incomplete information.
In short, Chippindale came very close to nailing the "what" and "how", but his interpretation of "why" left something to be desired. Because Mahon had to learn the ropes of aviation accident investigation, but was already quite well-versed in picking apart tangled corporate issues thanks to his legal career, he was able to set events within a much broader context. As I've learned from nearly 10 years on this forum, commercial aviation is rarely the "tight ship" it presents to the world, and was even less so 30-odd years ago. What Mahon and his team uncovered was the result of industry-wide growing pains. The jet age and the advent of widebodies presaged an explosion in air travel, but the regulations binding it and the regulatory bodies tasked with making sure the line was toed were stretched beyond their capacity to deal effectively with it - the airlines themselves were clearly improvising to some extent and were fostering among their crews an idea that things were better taken care of than they actually were.
Chippindale's position (and yours) seems to be that the crews should have known better off their own back and that the military habit of taking ultimate responsibility for everything should have been the norm for commercial operations too, but the fact is that it wasn't, in fact it never could be simply because of the size and complexity of the operations concerned. So in line ops a pilot *has* to trust the other departments implicitly to some extent, or the whole operation would grind to a halt. In this case they performed all the necessary checks - in fact went further in some ways - and stuck to what they had been told at the briefing believing that it would keep them safe. Mahon's opinion (and mine) is that they had every right to be entitled to do so.
Originally Posted by
henry crun
Can you give me one good reason why the radar controller, IF he had observed a brief paint, would not have advised the pilot of what he had seen ?
Not a good reason, but he simply might not have been paying close attention to where it was
On a separate subject, I note you never replied to the questions I asked in post #131.
I'll go back and check - if I didn't answer it usually means I didn't have one at the time.
Originally Posted by
ampan
If Capt Collins had done the same thing for just one of those waypoints, the accident would not have happened.
What if he did? What if he did just that but (again - reasonably, because he had not been notified of any change) used his notebook rather than the printout? The irony is that because of no concrete evidence either way, by misplacing or destroying the contents of the notebook ANZ made sure that even those sympathetic to their argument must accept the possibility.