Just to finish the communal hug, with particular regard to megan, I offer the following quote from page 279 of 'Daughters of Erebus' by the thankfully-late Paul Holmes: "Maria [Collins]: 'O, he always said he wasn't brainy. He had to sit School Cert twice. He always considered himself not very bright because everybody got it the first time except him."
Well, we'll never really know. The passage of time and reluctance to speak ill of a collegaue, let alone a dead colleague means that it'd be impossible to glean a truly accurate picture of Collins's ability or temperament.
You can't hang someone solely on the basis of having failed School Certificate. That said, thinking back to my School C days, I can't think of anyone I know of who failed that exam that I'd want in command of a large commercial aircraft. There was the poster 30 pages or so back who had flown with Collins who said he "could be pleasant to fly with, but there was a hard nosed streak". Putting all this together makes me wonder if Collins had that dreadful mixture of arrogance which is out of proportion to intellect. Combine that with Cassin, who a colleague described to me as "....a mouse. He wouldn't have spoken out unless he truly believed disaster was imminent" and you have a recipe for badness in the front end.
Megan said
I'm interested in answering the question, "why did he do that?"
I know you are megan, and we all are. But first you have to accept "he did that".
Collins made errors, and they need to be acknowledged. They were not
all the result of commercial pressure, or lack of training, or normalisation of deviance, but rather simple bad judgement and happened in complete isolation to the arguably substandard infrastructure surrounding these flights.