Some pilot error, adviser believes

Press, 2 February 1982, Page 6

Some pilot error, adviser believes

PA Auckland Air Marshal Sir Rochford Hughes, who advised counsel for the Mount Erebus commission on technical matters, believes the pilots of the Air New Zealand DCIO must be partly blamed for the disaster.

Sir Rochford said last evening that he believed Judge Mahon’s report was an excellent document which he agreed with almost fully. However, he believed the crew should have located Mount Erebus positively by visual or electronic means . before descending from the minimum safe altitude of 16,000 ft.

Sir . Rochford was responding to a statement by the Prime Minister (Mr Muldoon) after a Cabinet meeting yesterday, reported on the front page. Mr Muldoon said Sir Rochford would not be prepared to put his name to everything Mr Justice Mahon said in his report of a technical nature.

Sir Rochford said he believed about 90 per cent of the accident was due to faults in organisation but he could see no way in which the crew could escape accepting some responsibility. He said that the crew’s “unpardonable, lethal mistake was to. drop below minimum safe altitude (M.S.A.) relying on a navigation sys-

tern whose co-ordinates they had not checked with their topographical map. “It was the highest mountain there — the one thing they had to avoid.” Sir Rochford said he had the greatest respect for Judge Mahon, the Royal Commissioner. “Had he had two assessors such as the Royal New Zealand Air Force’s most experienced Antarctic flight captain and a senior DCIO airline captain from overseas with Arctic flying experience, the assessors could have daily debated with him the correct interpretation of the evidence given from an airman’s point of view,” he said. Sir Rochford said the Judge had in effect said that Captain T. J. Collins, the pilot of the DCIO, could be absolved of any responsibility because he had flown DClOs equipped with the sophisticated area inertial navigation system (AINS) for 10 years, . and had never found the system wanting..

“Therefore, Mr Justice Mahon, with a judicial mind, concluded the captain was perfectly entitled to put total reliance' on this one aid,” said Sir Rochford. “I believe it is a basic tenet of good airmanship to check any aid, no matter now sophisticated, by some other aid or visual reference

before descending below M.S.A. “A radar-controlled descent as offered by McMurdo would have served this purpose.” Even mariners at sea normally checked their satellite nagivation systems by sextant observation whenever possible, he said. Sir Rochford said he agreed with most of Mr Justice Mahon’s report, and he noted that Air New Zealand had not challenged any of the technical conclusions in the report. He most strongly supported the Judge’s recommendation that regulations for investigating serious accidents follow the British pattern, where the chief accident inspecctor acted as an agent for a public inquiry, which was presided over by someone like a judge, assisted by two professional assessors.