Mt Erebus accident.

[DozyWannabe]

Originally Posted by chris lz

Vette describes walls of clouds rising above them on either side

Does he? I'll admit to not having seen that. It certainly doesn't correlate with his submissions to the inquiry. There was an overcast around Ross Island above them and a fog bank at the base of Erebus (which under most conditions would have been further out into the bay). The let-down was performed in the patchy cloud north of Ross Island.

Vette calls the view from the aircraft cockpit a "visual counterfeit" of the McMurdo Sound track. But how much so? I would think that any track where there is terrain to your left and to your right would have more than a minute posibility of being taken by a flight crew for what they think should be there.

Vette's submissions are here:

http://www.erebus.co.nz/Portals/4/Do...non.pdf#page=7

Lewis Bay on the left, McMurdo Sound on the right. Top images show how they would appear on a clear day, middle images with some overcast and the lower images with sector whiteout due to the weather conditions as they were on the day.

Given this, I'm wondering if "doesn't contradict what they expect to see" is really the equivalent of a positive identification.

It was the best they had given the information supplied.

[HEATHROW DIRECTOR]

<<TRAINED to mostly disregard any position information offered by the local Navy-guys staffing McMurdo_radar>>

An interesting and remarkable statement. Why should the radar be unreliable or is it due to high ground and reduced low cover? Otherwise I'd take radar any day against a guy with a chinagraph and a spin wheel.

[IGh]

Radar-contact Arrival-CFIT lessons

Comment just earlier -- "... interesting and remarkable statement. Why should the radar be unreliable..."

Skepticism --> Maybe not that the 'radar was unreliable.' -- Mostly I filed such cases under the label "CFIT", but many of these could be more accurately filed as "involving ATC-Crew mis-communication" [read the link at bottom for an exemplar of fatal mis-comm'].

At the time, when nearing McMurdo, check-in & other radio-comm, you quickly felt that things just weren't "normal": McMurdo local controllers weren't the same as at SFO nor Oakland-Oceanic (not FAA, not USAF, nor NZCAA).

But the big ARRIVAL-CFIT training lessons were unmistakable during the 1970's: since the advent of Enhanced-GPWS it might be difficult for todays' pilots & controllers to comprehend that we regularly drove big turbojets into small peaks WHILE IN RADAR CONTACT.

Those "fatals" led to repeated training-sessions for all pilots, and extra training for the annual DeepFreeze. For us, then, a big lesson was that TWA B727 that impacted that tiny hill while on arrival at Washington DC's Dullus Int'l / 1Dec74 (pilot hurrying to get below cloud while descending through a turbulent cloud-layer). Then, for those MAC-pilots, they had the recent lesson of a MAC-crew [with a senior- CHECKAIRMEN professional Navigator] impacting a peak in the Olympic range while descending into McChord (near Tacoma) / 20Mar75: HistoryLink.org- the Free Online Encyclopedia of Washington State History

[India Four Two]

Aren't TACANs typically co-located with VORs?

stepwilk,

Typically (at least in the US), yes, but not all VORs are also TACANS. In your neck of the woods, the closest VOR/DME (TACAN sets can receive the DME range but no azimuth) is KINGSTON and the closest VORTAC is SPARTA (Azimuth and range for both VOR and TACAN receivers).

Stand-alone TACAN beacons are quite common at military airfields in the UK. In this case a civil aircraft can receive the DME range information only.