Even Captain Holmes accepts that you couldn’t go below MSA relying solely on the AINS:
In any case, as Gordon Vette says in Impact Erebus, Collins would never have gone lower than 16,000 feet, AINS or no AINS, without being visual. (Holmes p64)
But then this ridiculous nonsense:
“Having established that they ‘had the ground’, and in an example of excellent and professional airmanship, he took the DC-10 down in two great orbits …” (Holmes p64)
and smashed it into a mountain.
Then Holmes hammers home the point that they were VMC. Actually, they were not – but Holmes says they were never warned of the danger of flying visually below cloud. Three hundred pages later he discloses a piece of information that establishes the opposite. (Holmes p369). So he can’t even carry out a simple whitewashing exercise without cocking the whole thing up. Holmes is either very stupid or very careless, or both. An indication of the amount of care and attention he applied to his project is provided by his photograph of Exhibit 164. The whole point of that document to the ‘believers’ is that it shows a track to the Byrd Reporting Point, followed by a short dog-leg left to McMurdo Station – but all of that part is chopped off. And he couldn’t even be bothered getting a proof reader involved, because throughout his book he uses the word “judgement” to describe court decisions. (To be fair, he finally gets it right on the last occasion, at page 437, where it’s “judgment”.) It also appears that Holmes didn’t bother running his book past Paul Davison QC before it was published. Had he done so, he would have had “judgement” corrected (and he would have been asked to tone down the over-the-top flattery) - but most importantly, he would have been asked to remove the sentence stating that Captain Collins had visited Operation Deep Freeze for a briefing. Even if Holmes was too thick to appreciate the significance of that information, Davison certainly wasn’t. Note that the information was provided to Holmes by Davison, it being contained in an email sent to Davison on 5 December 2009 (Holmes p435). It appears that at this time, Davison was representing Mrs Collins on some matter connected with the accident (Holmes p93). Given that Davison obtained the information in the course of his acting for Mrs Collins, there is no possibility of his consenting to its publication, because it’s completely against Mrs Collins’ interests. If her late husband was briefed on sector whiteout, there is no possibility of any exoneration and history will judge him to be the person primarily responsible. Were it not for Holmes’ book, the fact of the air force briefing would never have come out. Davison probably passed over his files to Holmes, on the assumption that he would be sent a draft to check before the book was published. He would have been somewhat concerned in September 2011, when the book was released without him having received a draft. As he read his autographed copy (“To Paul from Paul” “XXXXX OOOOO”) things weren’t too bad, until page 369: “* * holy f*cking sh*t! * * may not be able to * * McMurdo today. Very hard to tell the difference between the ice and the clouds * * I’m gonna * * * * that H*lmes * * Stupid f*cking ***tox!! * *”
An apologetic Holmes probably sought to excuse his blunder by referring to "the fates" (Holmes p62).
Someone who might have saved the stupid twit from himself was Macfarlane, who was sent a draft of each “gripping” chapter (Holmes p10). I don’t know what Mcfarlane was doing with himself while he attempted to read page 369 in Chapter 25, but he could not have been paying close attention, probably because of cartoons.
“But the giant upon whose shoulders I stood and relied was retired law lecturer Stuart Macfarlane. Stuart Macfarlane is a walking authority on the Erebus disaster and his weighty tome The Erebus Papers, published in 1991, is nothing less than the Erebus encyclopedia. No serious study of Erebus can be undertaken without a copy of this book at an author’s side. Stuart’s wife and collaborator, Alison, says that after Stuart read the Court of Appeal decision on Mahon and decided the Court was being ‘silly’, he didn’t come home for dinner for about eight years, working, as he was, on what became of the impossibly exhaustive The Erebus Papers.” (Holmes p12)
Eight years, for that? The only use of The Erebus Papers is its extracts from the evidence, but Macfarlane was deliberately selective. For example, he decided to omit Exhibit 12, because it did not suit his purposes. (Exhibit 12 was the audio transcript of the briefing, which established that the briefed track was to McMurdo Station.) The material that Macfarlane wrote, which appears under the “Editorial Comment” headings, has all the hallmarks of someone who thinks they are very clever and who are actually quite the opposite. For instance, at page 670, he postulates an experiment regarding Captain Simpson’s various statements, the suggestion being that Simpson changed his story. But Macfarlane’s own book answers the whole Simpson issue. The captain, who now has my sympathies, was not looking at “16448.0E” when he did his “eye-balling” at the briefing. He was looking at “16641.0E”, which was 17 minutes west of the TACAN, at 166.58.E. That’s why he estimated the difference as 10nm. In other words, Simpson wasn’t looking at one of the flight plans provided by Captain Wilson. He was looking at the flight plan at page 104 of Macfarlane’s book, which had the NDB waypoint, and which was dated 1977. That flight plan was definitely available at the briefing, because it was used to program the simulator (Macfarlane p220). If you read Simpson’s evidence with that in mind, it all falls into place. At the briefing, he saw a 17 minute difference, which he estimated at being about 10nm. In the cockpit on the morning of the flight, he thinks he’s looking at the same flight plan, but he isn’t. When he gets down there, it’s blue skies, and he flies right of track down the Sound, then turns left towards McMurdo Station. He expected to be going left of track just before reaching the huts in the distance, but notes that he’s going left of track while he’s still 27nm away. That night, he asks himself how the hell he could have estimated two degrees of longitude as being only 10nm and he mentions it to Captain Johnson the following day. Why, then, did Simpson’s evidence come out the way it did? Macfarlane again provides the answer. In his statement to Chippindale made in March 1980, Simpson said that Wilson had flight plans from “previous years” flights (Macfarlane p 354). The flight plans Wilson actually provided were from the previous week’s flight. Simpson’s statement, therefore, is consistent with him having sighted a flight plan dated in 1977 with the NDB co-ordinates: 166E. Simpson’s statement was provided to ALPA’s lawyer, who just happened to be Davison (Macfarlane p353). He prepared a brief of evidence and shoved it under Simpson’s nose just before he was to give evidence before the Royal Commission (Macfarlane p661). Remember that the union didn’t want Simpson looking at anything around 166E, because that’s McMurdo Station. If the briefed track was to McMurdo Station, then Captain Collins made a very bad mistake when he did not sort out the conflict that he would have noted the night before. The union wanted Simpson looking at 164E, so the phrase “previous years” didn’t suit, because it meant that Simpson wasn’t looking at Wilson’s 164E flight plans from the flight a week before. Simpson’s brief of evidence, prepared by Davison, was as follows: “During the briefing Captain Wilson produced flight plans from a previous flight to the Antarctic for our perusal. (Macfarlane p227) The phrase “a previous flight” covers the flight a week before, whereas the phrase “previous years” does not. Problem solved, at least for the union. No so for Simpson, because he then had to explain how he could possibly have estimated two degrees of longitude as being only 10nm, and he doesn’t do a very good job of it (Macfarlane pp680-685). Simpson, through no fault of his own, was manoeuvred into an impossible position, by ALPA. If his brief of evidence was as per his March 1980 statement and contained the phrase “previous years”, then the truth would have emerged in cross-examination. Instead, Mahon was left with the firm view that Simpson believed, at the briefing, that the track was to a point two whole degrees west of McMurdo Station, rather than a mere 17 minutes. Yet Simpson actually left the briefing with the understanding conveyed by the audio, which was that the track was to McMurdo Station, to a point about 10nm west of the TACAN – but not then knowing that a track to that point from Cape Hallett went over Erebus. When he sat in the cockpit on the morning of his flight, checking his waypoints against his chart, he had a different waypoint which, when he checked it, was out in the middle of the Sound, away from McMurdo Station. Seems to be a reasonable spot for it to be, he thought, given that we’re only there for sightseeing. Given that he thought he was looking at the same flight plan that he had seen at the briefing, his impressions of the waypoint got lumped together in his memory, so that an impression he had in the cockpit was recalled as being an impression he also had at the briefing. This is probably why ALPA were able to slip various things past him, but the inquiry was not supposed to be a game for lawyers. The object of the exercise was to find out why 257 people died, and in that regard, it was a miserable failure. Holmes p15: “The Cast – Paul Davison QC: … Tore the navigation evidence apart.” That’s the only thing that Holmes gets right.
Chippindale got far closer to the truth than Mahon ever did. In fact, he went easy on the captain. Instead of citing the decision to go scud running when at FL180, Chippendale referred to “the decision of the captain to continue the flight at low level toward an area of poor surface and horizon definition when the crew was not certain of their position …” (Chippindale p53). On completion of the second orbit, at 0047:23GMT, the aircraft was at 2000 feet, headed back towards Erebus: “Yes Alt Cap (nav) track”. Vette says that what they saw out the window looked like McMurdo Sound, with a false horizon. Having seen that video of an Antarctic whiteout, that’s bull****. What they saw was a wall of white, with no horizon, hence “We might have to drop down to fifteen hundred here I think”. The transcript should have read “We might have to turn around and climb back to 160”. Instead, the captain continued on for a full two minutes, before deciding to climb out. Mahon played various wordgames with the phrase “not certain of their position”, but the plain fact of the matter is that if the captain was actually certain of his position (which is doubtful), he had no right to be.
Given number of mistakes made by the captain, the co-ordinates issue tends to fall by the wayside - and the captain was complicit in that as well, given his failure to resolve the conflict in the information he took from the briefing. If he was briefed on sector whiteout at Operation Deep Freeze, then I’d give him 85% of the blame, with 10% to F/O Cassin for not saying, at the appropriate time, “But didn’t you say ten minutes ago that it was very difficult to tell the difference between the cloud and ice?” F/O Lucas, who also attended the briefing at Operation Deep Freeze, gets the remaining 5%, for not wondering, while seated in the cabin, why the aircraft was orbiting when doing a radar-assisted descent.
The accident was caused by pilot error. It’s just another of example of someone attempting to fly VMC in instrument meteorological conditions. Obviously, AirNZ’s Flight Operations section made a series of terrible blunders, but all would have been well if the crew had done the job they were paid to do.
Holmes babbles on interminably about how the more you read Mahon, the more impressive he becomes. I’ve read his report many times over, and his book a few times less, and go in the opposite direction. I would not go quite as far as Gemmell (“He was an idiot.”) but there was something strange going on in his head when he wrote his report. There was no need for the “orchestrated litany of lies” finding, and he knew it. The explanation he gives in his book makes no sense, not do his various conspiracy theories. One example is the lack of passenger photos showing Ross Island. He spends two whole pages on this (Verdict on Erebus pp258,259), implying that someone might have removed the photos. Mahon says: “If you looked at the flight path of the aircraft as it completed its two orbits, it was obvious that there had been four occasions upon which the aircraft had been side-on to Ross Island.” Obvious? What was actually obvious was that there was no occasion when the aircraft was side-on to Ross Island, because it was banked about 20 degrees as it turned, hence the lack of photos.
Mahon died in 1986, from a type of cancer that developed in his sinus. (Holmes p397) Holmes would have it that the cancer was brought on by the Court of Appeal and Privy Council “judgements”. It may well have been the other way around, because malignant tumours are known to spread secondary tumours to other parts of the body, often well before the primary tumour is diagnosed, and there’s very little of anything else between the sinus and the brain.