Which, as it turns out, was precisely what happened at the Mahon inquiry and became the reason for the political backbiting and desperation on the part of Muldoon and his old boys' network to try to get it overturned.
This is why I'm inclined to be more favourable to the NZALPA/Mahon version of events - ANZ did everything they could to prevent any deviation from their side of the story from seeing the light of day because the management knew it would be their careers on the line.
Dozy that is not a good reason to favour their position. That is an emotional response. Totally understandable but not necessarily objective. Good people make mistakes. Sometimes they have to assume part or all of the responsibility for those errors. In this case you argue they bear no responsibility. That is where several of us are disagreeing with you. Some of it lies with the crew.
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.
This isn't true either. When I was in the Airforce (13 years ago now but I'm sure it's still the same) aircrew were highly dependant on other departments, in some cases more so than in the airlines.This is a totally different thing to being responsible for avoiding CFIT.
Totally.
In this case they performed all the necessary checks
necessary for what? Certainly not to keep them clear of terrain.
Here is a question that might help you understand my viewpoint;
When the aircraft requested and recieved a descent VMC, who was responsible for separating it from terrain?