Nothing can be gained by allotting blame now. The operation was out of the ordinary and Air NZ was out of its depth.
Under air law Captain Collins gets all the blame and it's unlikely Chippindale's finding can be challenged, but the outcome of any court case depends on how smart your lawyers are, what expert witnesses they can net in and the whim of jury members. We have seen already how Mahon painted, with colour and style, Collins as the victim.
In a statistical sense how much blame you get depends on how well you performed compared with your peers; that can only be conjecture since we cannot repeat the flight. How many pilots would have conducted it the way Collins did given the same circumstances? How many would have been saved by intelligence and airmanship?
From the airmanship perspective, the sympathy for Collins is worrying. NZALPA opines Captain Collins left NZ with the "wrong" situational awareness due to the unannounced change in coordinates for "McMurdo". I call that a mindset. For a humble VFR pilot, situational awareness is seeing where I am and where I am going, and if uncertain then flying the aircraft in a safe manner until that's resolved.
Below cloud and at 1500ft, nobody on the flight deck was certain of the aircraft's position - everybody was guessing - and the decision by the PIC to continue south smacks of get-home-itis.
Most likely had the "McMurdo" coordinates Collins entered into the AINS been the same as he plotted the night before, the crash would not have happened. That does not make his choices wise or his actions right. It would have meant he was lucky, this time.
We hear a lot about the safety culture; the attitude to safety in an organisation. Certainly an airline pilot is dependent on others knowing what they are doing and doing it. An organisation is only the people who make it; sometimes unfortunately the total is less than the sum. There need to be systems in place so there is no single point of failure.
We seem to hear less about safety as a personal philosophy or creed, perhaps it is taken for granted. At risk of incurring the wrath of the self-appointed gods of accidents, I speak again as an informed passenger on airliners. What I want up front is a pilot, not a philosopher, psychologist, political analyst or poet. A pilot who knows how to fly the aircraft and is careful.
Whether Collins was careful or not is a question of judgement. That is the crux of the matter, and one on which there seems no agreement.
Last edited by Ornis; 24th Apr 2012 at 03:58.
Reason: grammar