@prospector - Learned people agreeing with you is not the same as being correct.
Learned people disagreeing with me does not make them correct either. It depends a great deal on what their qualifications for being called learned relate to.
In the case in question the learned peoiple who I agree with are all very experienced aviators.
"Scud Run" is a misnomer in this case -
No it is not. Flying at 1,480ft below an 8/8 ths overcast which must have been under 2,000ft., because they went lower to try and see anything ahead of them, at 260kts plus, is scud running whether you know where you are or not. To carry out such a move in a 250 ton aircraft loaded with Pax is beyond belief, anywhere, much less Antarctica.
Please do not come back with the AINS track argument, it was not, at that time, and to the best of my knowledge, never has been cleared for any sort of instrument guidance below route MSA, which was 16,000ft.
Thus as far as I'm concerned (and given the deliberately destroyed evidence on the part of Mac Central and Air New Zealand), I have to apportion the responsibility as 15% NZCA for failing to update their regulations and failing to keep a regulatory eye on ANZ between 1977 and 1979 as far as Antarctic flights were concerned, 5% on Mac Central for destroying exculpatory evidence (which leads me to believe they were not paying attention to their radar), and 80% on Air New Zealand, for allowing standards to slip so spectacularly within the space of two years, having incredibly lax communication protocols between their nav section and operations and changing the INS co-ordinates without the crew's knowledge.
That is what you wrote earlier on in this thread, how does your summing up of 100% someone else's fault with your statement now that you say you never said the crew made no mistake????