The 1023 / 1024 QNH argument is something that can really only be settled by the people who were in the aircraft.
But I really really wish with the benefit of hindsight that me and my wife had had the balls to do what this guy is doing, and sue the examiner post flight test.
My wife is no softie (previous managerial experience in a huge company with 150 staff under her) and having spent quite a few years with her sitting next to me in the airline RHS I can personally vouch for the fact she's a damn good pilot. But back a few years ago when she sat her IR she was understandably nervous on flight test day because the examiner was a notably cranky old chauvinist who was renowned for making derogatory comments about woman pilots in the aero club bar.
On flight test day he called her a "silly girl" in the preflight brief, tore strips off her pretty much the entire flight and absolutely lost his rag on the go-round from the NPA, snatched control off her, informed her she'd failed, and he flew the aircraft back to the home airfield himself in stoney silence.
He started laying into her in the debrief as well, to cut a long story short, he reckoned she had messed up the go-round. She believed she had followed an ATC instruction. She was in tears by that stage but fortunately she was sticking to her guns and insisted they call up the tower and ask to play the tapes. No surprise, she was right and he was wrong - they had specifically told her to make an early turn onto a heading on the go-round, and he had missed hearing the call.
So once he was caught red handed, the old
very graciously agreed she hadn't failed - but he now insisted the test was "incomplete" because she hadn't flown a full go-round (even though HE was the one who had taken control) and so the following weekend she had to go back down there, pay another test fee and aircraft hire, fly all the way to the controlled airfield 45 minutes away, to do one circuit and go-round and fly all the way home again.
That whole episode cost her (us) another two or three thousand quid, for no reason other than the
old
wanted to act the big man and teach the girlie pilot a lesson. We talked and talked about it for a couple of weeks after that but decided it wasn't worth the aggro factor of making a formal complaint or court case - as several other old-boys-network types have pointed out already on this thread, pilot hiring is often done by one old-boy ringing up another old-boy, and shaking their cage can often do more harm than good to one's career prospects. That in itself, is just as wrong as the test result was - the fact that the old boys' network in this business can prevent people from making legitimate complaints and getting people's arses kicked when they really desperately deserve a good kicking.
There's no doubt the majority of CAA examiners are top drawer, fair and conscientious - but there are a couple of rotten apples, and they do essentially maintain their privileged position by virtue of the fact that the CAA is the most well protected, do-what-it-wants-with-no-comeback, old boy's network government department of them all.