I’ll deal with Captain Simpson’s evidence in a separate post, but as for:

“@oranmore - I don't mean to be rude, but your continuing assertion that the crew was briefed direct to the McMurdo Station TACAN simply flies in the face of the majority of the available evidence.  When giving evidence to the Commission; of the pilots who gave the briefing, Capt. Johnson stuck rigidly to the company line (i.e. track was over Erebus to TACAN, MSAs were clearly given).  Capt. Wilson initially presented a similar line, but at the end he acknowledged that he was aware of several flights going lower than the MSAs*.  Of the pilots who *attended* the briefing, all of them stated - categorically and without hesitation - that the briefed track was down the Sound to Dailey Island before a left turn to McMurdo.”

Some corrections:

The TACAN was not at McMurdo Station. It was about 8km away, by the ice runway.

The Minimum Safe Altitude issue is a separate issue – an up and down one. The track is a side to side issue.

Of the five pilots who attended the briefing, only three gave evidence, because two were dead. Of those three, the matter about which they were certain was that they were not told that the track would cross Ross Island / Mount Erebus.

The “left turn to McMurdo” route was that flown by military aircraft, who would fly down the sound to the Byrd Reporting Point, turn left, and land on the ice runway. The AirNZ route was direct to the McMurdo waypoint, there being no intention to land.

The penny won’t drop until you appreciate that the location of a waypoint and the track to that waypoint are separate and distinct matters. You are lumping them together. The location of a waypoint can be ascertained using co-ordinates, but to find the track to that waypoint you need to know a second location, namely, the location of the previous waypoint. In this case that was Cape Hallett, which was not shown on the map used at the briefing.

There was no evidence, from anyone, of any of the attendees at the briefing asking a question about the location of the McMurdo waypoint, yet we know that the audio-visual presentation stated that the waypoint was at McMurdo Station. We also know that after the audio-visual presentation, the pilots went into the simulator. One of the things they were to practise was a cloud-break procedure using the “NDB”. Unlike the TACAN, the NDB was at McMurdo Station. Before the simulator exercise began, the waypoints were entered into it. They first practised the change to grid navigation at 60 degrees south. Then, the simulator was repositioned to the McMurdo waypoint to practise the cloud-break procedure. So where did the simulator end up? McMurdo Station, or over 20 miles west? McMurdo Station. So where would an attendee think the waypoint to be? McMurdo Station. If any of the attendees thought that the waypoint was anywhere else then they would have asked a question when confronted with the contradictory information. No-one asked any such question.

“Mostly fair points there, but they rest on a single assumption - namely that the AV script and materials submitted by ANZ to the Commission (and previously shown to Chippindale) were in fact the same ones used at the briefing.”

They were definitely the same ones used at the briefing, and Mahon accepted that - refer to paragraph 164(b) on page 60 of the report.

 “I think it's fair to say that there's considerable reason to doubt that Exh. 12 accurately reflects the content of that briefing - at least to some extent.”

There is absolutely no reason to doubt that Exhibit 12 accurately reflects the content of the briefing. It was not produced to record what a speaker intended to say. Rather, it was produced as a script for a tape-recorded presentation, so the words in Exhibit 12 are exactly the words that came out of the speaker at the briefing – and, once again, Mahon took no issue with that.

"I'm not sure which map you are referring to on which the Cape Hallett waypoint does not appear, but certainly on both of the track-and-distance diagrams (i.e. "Annex J" in the Chippindale Report and Exh. 164 submitted by family counsel to the Commission) said to be supplied at the briefing, the Cape Hallett waypoint is both present and clearly labelled. "

Exhibit 164 has no relevance, because it was not one of the documents handed out at the briefing. Captain Simpson retained the documents that were handed out and he produced those documents to the Royal Commission – Exhibit 222. They did not include a copy of Exhibit 164, or “Annex J”. In any event, those documents are obviously rough drafts made by the navigation section. Neither is capable of demonstrating that a track from Cape Hallett to McMurdo Station goes over Erebus. In contrast, NZMS135 made that clear – see MacFarlane pp90,91. But all that was available at the briefing was a photocopy of the inset, which did not show Cape Hallett – see MacFarlane p37. If you look at that map, it’s very easy to see how a person could envision a track going down McMurdo Sound, with Ross Island to the left, direct to McMurdo Station. (For the avoidance of doubt, the track lines shown on the map in MacFarlane’s book were not marked on the map handed out at the briefing).

 "I must admit that I'm interested in how you got the information regarding the sim session - if it's available I'd love to have a look!  That said, I must respectfully suggest that the conclusions you're drawing seem to be a bit of a stretch."

I got the information from the evidence given to the Royal Commission, which is available at most public libraries – and which should be available on this website, but isn’t. As regards MacFarlane's book: Captain Johnson's evidence is at p220; Captain Simpson's evidence is at p228; First Officer Gabriel's evidence is at p234; First Officer Irvine's evidence is at p237.

 "My experience of physical (as in not MSFS/X-Plane) flight simulators consists only of messing around on a Link Trainer as a teenager and, more recently, a rather special session in a Level D A320 sim.  Therefore I'm not sure what the state-of-the-art in terms of sim technology was at ANZ in the '70s.  All I can find with a cursory search is that ANZ acquired a NZ$3m DC-10 simulator in 1972.  As I understand it, the most advanced simulators of that era were based around minicomputers with the operators sat at an external console and a comms link between the crew and the operators.  The view from the sim's windows were usually back-projected and very basic.

I'm therefore pretty certain that any simulated NDB let-down training would have been based around simulated position relative to an arbitrary NDB location - co-ordinates entered by the operators outside rather than the NAV co-ordinates used at the briefing.  As this was procedural training in which use of NAV track was not involved, I don't think those waypoints or co-ordinates would have come into it at all - sim time was and still is very expensive, and any non-essential work is usually to be avoided.  "Repositioning" in this instance would be a case of the operators outside, rather than the pilots in the sim, entering a position relative to the (arbitrary) simulated NDB location.  Of course, if you know differently I'd love to hear about it."

How does the material in the first paragraph get you to the “I’m therefore pretty certain ...” at the start of the second paragraph? I can’t see the connection. You are correct about one thing: Captain Johnson repositioned the simulator, not one of the pilots. But there is no doubt that one of the pilots, probably First Officer Cassin, entered waypoints into the simulator. If your theory were correct, there would have been no point doing that. Further, during the practice of the cloud-break procedure the runway lights at the airfield were displayed on the screen, so the location was not “arbitrary”. There was no dispute about any of this. The only matter that was disputed was where the simulator was repositioned to. Captain Johnson said it was repositioned to 50 miles north of McMurdo Station. The three surviving pilots disagreed. They said that the simulator was repositioned to overhead the McMurdo Station / Williams Field area.

Exhibit 134: It was part of the material handed out to Captain Ross McWilliams during a briefing that occurred in 1978, a year before. No-one was able to explain how a rough draft like that was able to find its way into the briefing package. But thank-you for posting that picture of Exhibit 134, because it demonstrates how useless that document would have been to assess the track from Cape Hallett to the McMurdo waypoint.

“ “In any event, those documents are obviously rough drafts made by the navigation section. Neither is capable of demonstrating that a track from Cape Hallett to McMurdo Station goes over Erebus.” True, but hypothetically speaking, if a pilot attending the briefing did take a copy away along with the co-ordinates with the intent of plotting the course on a map in their own time, it would certainly provide a handy cross-reference check as they were working, would it not?”

It would not.

“ “But there is no doubt that one of the pilots, probably First Officer Cassin, entered waypoints into the simulator.”  Right, but he did so from a flight plan he knew to be obsolete - and as I said in the other thread, I'm a little puzzled as to the motivation behind training an NDB let-down procedure using actual co-ordinates for an NDB which had been out of service for quite some time by then.  The coherence of the briefing as a whole appears - with the benefit of 20/20 hindsight - to have suffered somewhat between 1977 and late 1979.”

You seem to have some difficulty staying with a subject. The issue, you might recall, was the waypoint conveyed to the pilots by the simulator exercise. I said it was McMurdo Station. You disagreed, with the suggestion that the position of the NDB used for the cloud-break procedure might have  been “arbitrary”, rather than being at a particular location. . I then pointed out that waypoints were entered into the simulator and asked what the point of that would be if your theory was correct. Instead of providing an answer to that question, for the probable reason that there is none, you change the subject, from one about the waypoint location conveyed by the simulator exercise to one about the quality of that exercise. (As to your new subject, no-one would disagree with your contention that the briefing was of poor quality and that contradictory information was given. That does not mean that a pilot can select which item of information to adopt as being correct.)