Erebus 25 years on

[Welsh Wingman]

2015

NS14,

Re: (3) and (4), don't get too focussed on the waypoints, or you will lose sight of the wood for the trees when it comes to the Erebus mishap.

Williams Field? NDB? TACAN? Western (i.e. Dailey Island)? It was all part of the systemic failure within the AirNZ of the time (and the (lack of) oversight by CAD). There was only one waypoint those flights should have had programmed from the very first flight in February 1977 - the military Byrd reporting point, before military aircraft began their easterly dog leg descent down the chute to McMurdo. That would have always placed the flight upon arrival in the area at MSA and firmly on the USN ATC radar. No communication/radar line of sight issues, and no overflying of an active volcano. The AINS was accurate enough, even if ideally one would want a ground navigation aid as the waypoint.

Once the USN ATC picked up the incoming sightseeing flight on its radar at the Byrd Reporting Point waypoint, the PIC of the DC10 could seek his clearance from USN ATC to descend VFR provided the DC10 never left the USN's radar scope without permission (or at all?).

Mahon produced an excellent ground breaking report, way ahead of its time, and dealing with systemic/organisational failure. In those days, systemic failure not overcome by the pilots was just misleadingly classified as "pilot error". But not what NZ PM Robert Muldoon wanted to hear, as the shareholder of the state national carrier! The AirNZ planning and CAD oversight of the Antarctic flights was poor (waypoints, nav track, whiteout, prior flight experience, route clearance, survival equipment). There was an administrative malaise within the airline, particularly within flight operations and sub-sections such as navigation and the RCU. Communication in particular. The consumer pressure facing the pilots, Ross Island being the star attraction. The flight crew were programmed to fly down McMurdo Sound and the aircraft itself was programmed to overfly Ross Island, never a happy scenario. Even NZALPA joined in, with the flights treated as a Buggins' turn perk for senior captains rather than sensibly training, say, 3 permanent crews for this route. I recall some ICAO official getting into trouble after the Mahon report was published, for saying something like "What's going on down there, it's like a Third World country?"). Reading the planning of those Antarctic flights makes grim reading. The US District Judge Greene later wrote "Were it not for the tragic outcome, the planning phase of Flight 901 could be described as a comedy of errors; some of these errors were perpetrated by Air New Zealand, others by members of the flight crew."

But Mahon made two mistakes.

Firstly, he overstepped the mark in relation to AirNZ with his "orchestrated litany of lies" angle, no doubt clearly unhappy about their post-accident behaviour and (rightly?) exacerbated by their witnesses behaviour towards his Royal Commission but, fatally breaching the rules of natural justice. This judicial finding by the NZ Courts and the Privy Council reduced the focus on their pre-flight behaviour and failings, ironically the very last thing he would have wanted.

Secondly, this probably also contributed towards Mahon feeling sympathy for the pilots and their families, enough to exonerate them and which was going too far for many. This was, after all, a CFIT at FLT 015 into a FLT 130 mountain with a fully functioning DC10. See the later comments of Air Marshal Rochford Hughes, technical adviser to counsel for the Royal Commission. There are aspects of that flight that are troubling, e.g. descent without a permanent fix and without a radar let down, even if the majority of the blame lies elsewhere. The complete exoneration was as controversial as the initial attempt to lay nearly all the blame on the pilots, as this was Antarctica and a "clean flight" configuration at FLT 015 in a wide bodied commercial passenger airliner is not something to enter into lightly in proximity to high terrain.

The failure to divert to the dry valleys? The sudden orbiting descent to get under the cloud cover ahead? Missing Beaufort Island on the wrong side of the INS nav track? Failing to grasp an obvious non-meteorological explanation for the VHF and TACAN issues (intervening high ground)? Failing to plot the nav track entered in the INS during the actual flight, on the run south from Auckland to the Bellany Islands (surely a job for F/O Cassin?)? Failing to check and plot the entered McMurdo waypoint in the INS before descending? Failing to check and plot the current position in the INS, before descending? Obviously the lack of whiteout training, and the presence of sector whiteout, ultimately misled the flight crew although its interesting that Capt Collins elected a left climb in the last seconds of his life (had the penny finally dropped...?).

This incident unfortunately became contentiously black v white in New Zealand, and still is, with no shades of grey. That was unhelpful. The flight crew made mistakes that day, others made far bigger mistakes in the chain of causation.

Trust this helps.