Originally Posted by
henry crun
DozyWannabe: For the benefit of framer, myself, and probably many pilots reading this thread, if an NDB does not provide bearing infomation, please tell us what it does provide and how it is used.
OK, so I got my wires crossed - you *can* get bearing information from an NDB, but it requires more mental calculation than, say, VOR. In any case the NDB was (officially at least) not in service, so other than getting me to admit a mistake (which I'm happy to do) not much else has changed.
Back to the subject at hand, the weather was within minimums for the flight path they took - certainly it was not as promising as it had been for many of the other flights, but they didn't break any rules (at least - any of those that they had not been told to disregard). Remember that they thought they were headed down McMurdo Sound and that the overcast applied only to the immediate area of Ross Island. There were enough breaks in the cloud between 2,000 and 16,000ft for the crew to make a visual descent and because they thought they were well west of where they actually were they probably did not expect the overcast to present much of a problem until they reached the immediate area of Ross Island and turned left once south-west of the mountains (the point at which Simpson had noticed the waypoint discrepancy).
In short they were expecting the overcast to be east of their position and as far as they were concerned the conditions in which they made their descent (broken cloud) would remain the same until they turned left.
Riddle me this - if NZCA and ANZ were so confident that the allegation of busting minima would prove pilot error as the primary factor, then why invent the story of them being in cloud when they crashed (which was later proven to be incorrect, but not before the press reports based on this allegation had fixed it in the public's mind)?
@prospector - I detect a logical inconsistency in your argument. Given that your position is that the crew deserve to share responsibility on the grounds that they did not go "by the book", it takes considerable chutzpah to argue that they were remiss in not using the weather radar for terrain avoidance despite the fact that Bendix expressly forbade use of the weather radar in this manner in their own operations manual. If the management pilots in whom you set so much store did use it this way then it is they who were in the wrong - if, of course, one were to go "by the book". Also, Mahon never had a "theory" of his own while the inquiry was in session - it was his job to assess the theories and evidence submitted, then formulate the most likely sequence of events and the responsibility for those events based on the quality of evidence submitted. Given that ANZ management presented only the evidence which supported their case and deliberately destroyed the rest then they really only have themselves to blame for giving the late Justice reason to distrust them.