In this case, the world was white and white.
Screeds could be written about Mahon's conspiracy theories, but the real point is that they had no relevance to the issue. The mighty judge had exposed the alleged conspiracies. Having done that, his job was to determine the cause/s. Instead, he got completely sidetracked - and don't take my word for it:
But there was an aviation expert more or less attached to the commission and not associated with the airline – Air Marshall Sir Rochford Hughes, who was the technical advisor to David Baragwanath QC, the senior lawyer appointed to assist the inquiry and Mahon’s legal right hand during the hearings. Hughes had a distinguished service career and had been advisor to foreign governments on aviation matters. He had also sat as an assessor on an aircraft crash investigation in Britain. …
“Mahon wrote his report on Erebus entirely on his own, without any reference to either David Baragwanath or certainly myself,” says Hughes … I think David read it with as great an interest as I did as it was completely contrary to some things we had urged him to take cognisance of. The main point was he had convinced himself – and we had no disagreement with that – that the basic cause of the accident was the lack of proper organisation within Air New Zealand for the execution of a flight to a territory totally remote from regular airline routes. For reasons best known to the judge, he formed a great sympathy for the lot of the pilots on that flight. That’s where the difficulties arose. He felt they were fully entitled to rely implicitly on the internal navigation system which they used on regular routes, but of course that had limitations on the Antarctic route, and I don’t think any of the air force authorities or I would agree that was the way an Antarctic flight should be conducted.”
Sir Rochford Hughes says the crew must accept 10 to 20 percent of the blame for descending without first being picked up by radar and without identifying the high ground: “My great difference of opinion with the judge is that the captain ultimately had full responsibility for the control and navigation of his aircraft. It was a terrible error of judgement coming below safety height without positive radar control. He came down at low altitude in a position which prevented the US naval radar from seeing him because the mountain was in the way. That was the fatal mistake. He should never have come below safety height until he was under positive radar control. That is the rule for military flights.” (North & South magazine, November 1989, pages 85-86)