Someone who doesn't know where they are is "lost" but so to is someone who thinks they know where they are but are wrong. I would venture to suggest that the latter person is the more lost, which describes Captain Collins situation from Cape Hallett into jaws of Lewis Bay on Ross Island. At that point he moved into the former situation, in that he didn't know where he was.
Well, I'm not sure. It's surely unreasonable to condemn someone who has no idea they are lost.
But the question we have in front of us is "was Capt. Collins justified in believing in his original position, to the extent of doing a VMC (putting aside VMC issues for a moment) descent down to 1500'?". The answer is surely no - for all the many reasons already discussed.
I see and hear of many cars going through red traffic lights. I decide to do the same, however I collide with another car going through a green light.
Would Professor Diane Vaughan theory be a credible defence??
According to Megan, yes.
Megan said :
I found it interesting that it pointed out that the McMurdo controllers would only be available if they had Deep Freeze aircraft operating. So it was entirely feasible that the sight seeing flights would have no one to talk to. Puts their cloud break procedure in the trash can, and once again points out the lack of planning by the airline.
Let's say, for arguments sake, that you're right. Let's agree for a moment that Air NZ's cloud break procedure was actually completely unusable and invalid. It doesn't matter - because the
flight never got to that point! It's not as if Collins positioned himself for the procedure, briefed his crew, then said "what they hey! There's no-one at home at Mc Murdo!! Those dorks! What are we going to do do now? Have to try and go down VMC through this hole, I guess......". He was offered a radar guided descent. He abandoned that idea, simultaneously it would seem with failure to establish VHF comms and seeing a hole in the cloud. And down he went. Without even cross checking his position off the INS.
As an aside, have a look at this video at around the 7:00 mark. A flight crew in a mountainous area above cloud paying a lot of attention to MSA.