This incident unhelpfully became contentiously black v white in New Zealand, and still is, with no shades of grey. That was unhelpful. The flight crew made mistakes, others made far bigger mistakes in the chain of causation.
That may be your opinion, many think by far the greater mistakes were made by the crew. No matter what mistakes had been made by other people the decision to break all standing orders, such as no descent below 16,000ft unless specific requirements were met, none of which were complied with. As stated by
p
unkalouver It appears that descents below 16,000 feet were only allowed in a sector to the true south of McMurdo. Why were they descending even if VMC north of McMurdo?
Missing Beaufort Island on the wrong side of the INS nav track?
The Island was, as was shown by pictures recovered from camera's of Pax, was very visible, if attention was being paid by any of the crew to the actual position of the aircraft, rather than "following the magenta line" it should have been obvious that something was not as it should be.