Centaurus @ 2nd Jan 2012 18:56 post #431
"The Bendix company (weather radar) opinion was that because the slopes of the mountainside were covered in snow and ice which was totally dry, then the return from from the mountain would be nil."
The last clause, in italics, might(not, in my opinion), or not, be true. However there were plenty of exposed rock faces and cliffs so that in the hands of a skilled operator it would have been possible to see the coastline all the way down from Cape Hallet. Cape Hallet itself would have been detectable from 200 nm(or 180 if the DC10 radar was analogue - I've not flown the 10 but imagine that it was digital). To detect relevant terrain from low altitude the radar should be in weather, not map, mode and tilt and gain manually adjusted to find the sought features.* There were even exposed rock faces on Erebus which would certainly have given strong returns. I don't hold Collins blameworthy for not knowing how to use the radar for an undesigned function, it's just another of the things in which Air New Zealand did not train its pilots. In their normal operations it was of no relevance at all.**
Air New Zealnd training; why was it so bad.
Both in the Sixies and Seventies TEAL and NAC were government owned and totally corrupt. TEAL/AIRNZ, as everybody knows, had destroyed two aircraft in training during the Sixties. Nothing had changed through the Seventies.
*It is often possible to use technology do do useful things other than that for which it was designed, or even, perhaps, known by the designers. For one instance, even in 1961, more than 20 years after its design NAC had still not solved the single circuit U/C downlock indication problem. I solved it withiin minutes of exposure to it on my DC3 course. The solution to the problem was trivial but nobody had bothered to solve it. It did matter. The problem was serious as the bent wings on a DC3, a few years later, attested.
**Except possibly in the early sixties when the Electras constantly succeded in landing on 16 at Wellington when all others were unsuccessful.