Commissioner ‘financial victim’ of crash inquiry

Press, 31 October 1984, Page 2

Commissioner ‘financial victim’ of crash inquiry

The Mount Erebus air crash Royal Commission cost the Commissioner, Mr Peter Mahon, $500,000. This is the gross amount the former High Court Judge estimates he would have earned in the nine years he had left on the Bench had the rejection of his appeal not forced his resignation. In Christchurch yesterday, as part of a tour to launch his book, “Verdict on Erebus,” Mr Mahon said he did not consider that he had fallen victim to the inquiry. “I have been a financial victim,” he said, however. Mr Mahon said the Privy Council rejection of his appeal meant that he could no longer remain as a High Court judge. His estimation of $500,000 in gross salary loss does not include superannuation benefits he forfeited with his resignation. Mr Mahon’s quantification of financial loss joins a claim this week by a former Air New Zealand pilot, Mr Gordon Vette. that he lost $1 million in salary and superannuation payments when he resigned from the airline to investigate aspects of the crash. (Report, page 24). Mr Mahon said that over all he was not bitter now about the whole affair. “I was bitter at the time of the Appeal Court judgment,” he said. “As far as I am concerned now it is all past history.”

Mr Mahon said the inquiry and its repercussions had seriously affected his whole family. “But I have got the public

behind me and I have got the aviation world behind me,” he said. “I foresaw long before the report was published that I would be instantly attacked by the airline management, and the financial loss I suffered is just one of those things that happen, as happened to Gordon Vette.” The publication of his book is not the end of the Erebus affair for Mr Mahon. He said that he had found un to 20 factual, errors in

the Privy Council judgment and hoped to analyse them for Commonwealth legal Sublications “in due course.” [e described the errors as technical mistakes. Mr Mahon said his book was not an attempt to get in the last word on the Mount Erebus crash issue but an account of the inquiry written so that it could be understood by the general public. The book had been called for by people both in

New Zealand and overseas, he said. ‘lt is the first account to my knowledge of the course of an inquiry into a massive air disaster. The circumstances were so unusual... the aircraft just disappeared without being seen or heard from, the part of the world where it happened, and it was the first case of a computer mistake causing an aircraft crash,” Mr Mahon said. He said he had been approached in the last few days by many people who had lost relatives in the crash and who said thev were pleased finally to be able to read an account of what happened. “It was a long and painstaking task to discover the facts. It certainly was a most fascinating experience. I enjoyed every minute of it,” he said. Mr Mahon said that were he to undertake the investigation again, he would do things exactly the same way. Two main lessons came out of the inquiry. The first was the susceptibility of the aircraft computer system to typing error, Mr Mahon said, and the second was the existence of ocular deception in certain latitudes of the world. Experts world wide had accepted these indicators as a result of the disaster and subsequent inquiry, he said. “You cannot just write off one of the world’s most terrible air disasters by dropping it off as if it never happened. We haven’t heard the last of it by a long chalk,” Mr Mahon said.