ahhh . . dead right PLovett . .. . . we do not want to get immersed in tortuous debate yet again. .. . my opinion is as worth a crumpet as yours in the broad scheme of air accident investigation. If you have read and tried to grasp everything you can lay your hands on about TE901 are you then an authority on the subject? Maybe. Maybe not.
There are still many in the airline industry, and retired from it, who ever will respect and admire the late Gordon Vette for his fearless pursuit of the truth, as he saw it.
This from The Auckland Herald last August -
A seeker of justice they couldn't silence
Captain Alwyn Gordon Vette, 82, whose death the other day was largely overlooked by the news media, played a vital role in obtaining justice in New Zealand's most controversial air disaster - the 1979 Erebus crash.
As Air New Zealand and its spin machine worked overtime to blame the crew for Flight TE901 crashing into Mt Erebus in the Antarctic, killing all 257 people on board, Captain Vette quickly began to consider the crew was not to blame.
He did not accept the cause of the crash was pilot error, and at Justice Peter Mahon's subsequent Royal Commission of Inquiry into the crash, he presented his investigative efforts to Justice Mahon - and they were accepted.
Effectively written off by Air New Zealand, Captain Vette's investigative efforts - which cost him his career - were part of the public debate and demand that precipitated the Mahon Inquiry - six months after the release of the official accident report.
Justice Mahon presented his extensive findings, which supported Captain Vette's provocative and original theories about the tragedy of TE901.
Justice Mahon described a single cause of the Erebus disaster: "In my opinion therefore, the single dominant and effective cause of the disaster was the mistake made by those airline officials who programmed the aircraft to fly directly at Mt Erebus and omitted to tell the aircrew. That mistake is directly attributable, not so much to the persons who made it, but to the incompetent administrative airline procedures which made the mistake possible."
For me IMPACT EREBUS did a lot in helping to understand something of the front of house crew in a wide body. I think Gordon Vette should be accorded better respect by those who rejected his book and bagged him almost belligerently. Read it before daring to venture an opinion -
Last edited by Fantome; 31st May 2016 at 12:33.