Speaker 1: Pushkin Air New Zealand Flight nine oh one is flying
Speaker 1: straight towards a mountain. Two hundred and fifty seven people
Speaker 1: are on board, most of them sipping champagne and hearing
Speaker 1: eagerly out of the windows. It's November nineteen seventy nine.
Speaker 1: This is a sightseeing trip to Antarctica. They took off
Speaker 1: from New Zealand this morning. They'll enjoy some views of
Speaker 1: spectacular icy landscapes. If it's not too cloudy, of course,
Speaker 1: then they'll loop around and land back in New Zealand
Speaker 1: in time for dinner. Captain Jim Collins talks to the passengers.
Speaker 2: The cloud cover in the McMurdo area has.
Speaker 1: Increased, although ground.
Speaker 2: Visibility is good. We will be taking advantage of the
Speaker 2: raidar facilities at McMurdo for letdown, which should take us
Speaker 2: below the cloud and give us a view of the
Speaker 2: McMurdo area.
Speaker 1: McMurdo the McMurdo Sound, an inlet between mainland Antarctica and
Speaker 1: Ross Island. There's an American research base at McMurdo with
Speaker 1: a small airstrip on the ice. Captain Collins calls them
Speaker 1: on the radio to check there are no other planes around.
Speaker 1: They assume they'll see him soon flying low over the inlet.
Speaker 1: But Captain Collins isn't flying towards the water of McMurdo Sound.
Speaker 1: He's flying towards a mountain, a twelve thousand foot active
Speaker 1: volcano to be exact. Also in the cockpriit is famed
Speaker 1: and Arctic explorer Peter Mulgrew. He's there to entertain the passengers,
Speaker 1: telling stories and pointing out landmarks.
Speaker 3: This is Peter Mulgrew again, folks.
Speaker 2: I still can't see very much at the moment. Keep
Speaker 2: you informed as soon as I see something that gives
Speaker 2: me a clue.
Speaker 1: As to where we are. Peter Mulgrew can't see where
Speaker 1: they are as Collins takes the plane down to a
Speaker 1: gap in the cloud. But a display in the cockpit
Speaker 1: should tell them where they are. It shows their distance
Speaker 1: to the next pre programmed waypoint in their computerized flight path.
Speaker 1: That morning, the crew got a print out of the
Speaker 1: coordinates for those waypoints, which they manually entered into the
Speaker 1: plane's navigation system. The flight engineer wants to check something.
Speaker 3: Where's Erebus in relation to us at the moment?
Speaker 1: To the left, He's told Erebus that's the twelve thousand
Speaker 1: foot volcano.
Speaker 3: I'm just thinking of any high ground in the area,
Speaker 3: that's all.
Speaker 1: But Mount Erebus isn't to their left, it's straight in
Speaker 1: front of them. Captain Collins keeps descending to fifteen hundred feet.
Speaker 1: The old Antarctic hand Peter Mulgrew, peering through the window,
Speaker 1: sees enough to get his bearings, or so he thinks.
Speaker 3: Ross Island.
Speaker 1: Eh, they've now lost radio contact with the Americans at McMurdo.
Speaker 1: The flight engineer is feeling uneasy.
Speaker 3: I don't like this.
Speaker 1: Captain Collins also seems to sense that something isn't right.
Speaker 4: We're twenty six miles north. We'll have to climb out
Speaker 4: of this.
Speaker 1: Twenty six miles north. That'll be north of the next
Speaker 1: pre programmed waypoint. We'll come back to that, climb out
Speaker 1: of this. We'll come back to that too. The dialogue
Speaker 1: in this cockpit recording will be bitterly debated. But now
Speaker 1: the ground proximity alert is going off. Wood woop, pull up,
Speaker 1: wood whoop, pull up.
Speaker 3: Five hundred food.
Speaker 1: They shouldn't be that low. Maybe it's a false alarm
Speaker 1: four hundred food. Anyway, there's a routine procedure when this alert,
Speaker 1: goes off, boost the engine power and climb. Captain Collins
Speaker 1: doesn't sound concerned.
Speaker 4: Go around power please wood whoop, pull up.
Speaker 1: I'm Tim Harford and you're listening to cautionary tales. When
Speaker 1: Jim Collins put his name forward for a sightseeing flight
Speaker 1: to Antarctica, it was more in hope than expectation. Collins
Speaker 1: was experienced and respected by his colleagues. He was cautious, methodical,
Speaker 1: always taking notes, but aged just forty five, he wasn't
Speaker 1: one of the top guys, the senior pilots who were
Speaker 1: also company executives. When Air New Zealand started their sightseeing flights,
Speaker 1: the executive pilots called dibbs. They wanted to see Antarctica too.
Speaker 1: But now the flights had been running for a couple
Speaker 1: of years, ordinary pilots were also getting a turn. Collins
Speaker 1: was thrilled to see his name on the roster. The
Speaker 1: evening before the flight, he sat at home with a
Speaker 1: big map, drawing lines and pointing things out to his
Speaker 1: teenage daughters. In the morning, Colin's wife, Maria waved him
Speaker 1: off with a reminder of her call at the shop
Speaker 1: on the way home. Don't forget the fish, but The
Speaker 1: early evening brought a phone call from Air New Zealand.
Speaker 1: We're just a bit concerned about Jim's flight. We haven't
Speaker 1: heard from him for a while. Are you on your own?
Speaker 4: Will the cutter here?
Speaker 1: Have you got another adult there with you? No, might
Speaker 1: be an idea in that moment, said Maria Collins. Later
Speaker 1: she was struck by cold. At nine o'clock, the television
Speaker 1: news led with the missing plane. By now it would
Speaker 1: be out of fuel. Wherever it was, it wasn't still flying.
Speaker 1: In the early hours of the morning, another phone call
Speaker 1: the Americans had spotted what remained of the plane smudged
Speaker 1: across the frozen slopes of Mount Erebus. Police from New
Speaker 1: Zealand were flown out to help with the cleanup. They
Speaker 1: had no specialist training or experience of Antarctica. One had
Speaker 1: never even seen snow, he recalled.
Speaker 3: My senses were overloaded. All the bodies in the wreckage
Speaker 3: an overpowering smell of kerosene. I almost fell through thin
Speaker 3: ice into a crevise.
Speaker 1: Strewn across the snow or champagne, bodies and money and
Speaker 1: cameras and people's diaries. The policeman couldn't resist taking a
Speaker 1: peek inside.
Speaker 3: One described the trip so far and how beautiful the
Speaker 3: Antarctic was. The last words in the diary were jee,
Speaker 3: it's great to be alive.
Speaker 1: The policeman finds Captain Collins's body and nearby his ringbinder.
Speaker 1: He looks inside that too. It's intact, and the pages
Speaker 1: are filled with what looked like briefing notes. It might
Speaker 1: be important. He carefully seals it in a bag. Jim
Speaker 1: had friends among the executive pilots the company men. Collins
Speaker 1: noticed that when they called on her, they started saying
Speaker 1: things like, of course Jim was too low, or it
Speaker 1: was so unlike Jim to contravene any regulations. Maria says, I.
Speaker 3: Gained the impression that they were trying to break it
Speaker 3: to me gently, that Jim would be hill to blame.
Speaker 1: Then they stopped calling at all. One spelled it out
Speaker 1: as he stood in her doorway, Maria, I won't be
Speaker 1: able to see you anymore. I've got to be with
Speaker 1: the company. Jim had been a groomsman at his wedding,
Speaker 1: but not all of Jim's mentors deserted him. One senior pilot,
Speaker 1: who taught Jim to fly, told Maria.
Speaker 3: This isn't Jim, Maria, this is not Jim's behavior. Something's wrong.
Speaker 3: I'm going to find out.
Speaker 1: Just as Maria Collins had feared. When the Chief Inspector
Speaker 1: of Air Accidents published his investigation report, it left no
Speaker 1: doubt that Jim was to blame. He had contravened the
Speaker 1: regulations flying well below the minimum safe altitude of sixteen
Speaker 1: thousand feet, and he had done so when the visibility
Speaker 1: obviously wasn't good. You could tell that from the transcript
Speaker 1: of the cockpit voice recording. It was damning. We heard
Speaker 1: some of it earlier. Antarctic expert Peter mulgrew, not having
Speaker 1: a clue where they were. At one point, just two
Speaker 1: minutes before impact, a voice says, a bit thick here, Ahbert,
Speaker 1: a bit thick. They must be referring to cloud right.
Speaker 1: The report also mentioned some sort of error with the
Speaker 1: waypoint coordinates, but that had been fixed before Colin's flight,
Speaker 1: and anyway, it didn't matter. If Collins had kept to
Speaker 1: the minimums safe altitude, he wouldn't have crashed, simple as that. Still,
Speaker 1: a disaster this big couldn't be left to the Chief
Speaker 1: Inspector of Air Accidents. There need to be a proper
Speaker 1: formal inquiry with evidence given in public. The government appointed
Speaker 1: a Judge Peter Marn to conduct a Royal commission, with
Speaker 1: technical advice from a distinguished Air Marshal. Marn was no fool.
Speaker 1: He understood that the Chief Inspector's report was convenient for
Speaker 1: the government. Air New Zealand was state owned. If the
Speaker 1: company had screwed up, the government could face expensive claims
Speaker 1: for compensation. But if the pilot's screwed up insurance would
Speaker 1: fit the bill. Marn knew the government hoped hid back
Speaker 1: up the report, and the report did seem convincing. Marn
Speaker 1: later recalled.
Speaker 4: I presumed that after testing the evidence at first hand,
Speaker 4: I would see no difficulty in confirming the Chief Inspector's opinion.
Speaker 1: Still, though, if Jim Collins had known his flight path
Speaker 1: took him straight towards a twelve thousand foot volcano, why
Speaker 1: was he flying at fifteen hundred feet. Maybe it had
Speaker 1: to do with that error in the waypoint coordinates.
Speaker 4: Marn recalls, I had the impression that there might be
Speaker 4: a great deal more to this than was admitted on
Speaker 4: the surface.
Speaker 1: There was cautionary tales will be back after the break
Speaker 1: on a normal flight that goes from A to B.
Speaker 1: Your final waypoint is obvious. It's the destination airport that
Speaker 1: air New Zealand sight seeing flights weren't going to land
Speaker 1: in Antarctica. They were going to see some sights then
Speaker 1: fly back home. So what to choose is the final
Speaker 1: waypoint for their computerized flight path. In a way, it
Speaker 1: didn't matter if visibility was good, they'd just fly around
Speaker 1: for a bit. But the computer needed a waypoint, so
Speaker 1: they picked a radio beacon near the American base at McMurdo.
Speaker 1: It seemed as good a choice as any. Actually it
Speaker 1: was stupid. It meant the flight path went right over
Speaker 1: an active volcano, Mount Erebus. Even stupider when Erebus was
Speaker 1: between the plane and the base, the Americans wouldn't see
Speaker 1: the plane on their radar, and you'd struggle to get
Speaker 1: a connection on the radio. Then the flight path stored
Speaker 1: in the company's computer was changed with a new waypoint
Speaker 1: twenty five miles west, near the end of McMurdo Sound.
Speaker 1: This was much more sensible. Now the flight path took
Speaker 1: you over open water. For over a year, pilots of
Speaker 1: the Antarctic flights got printouts with these sensible new coordinates.
Speaker 1: But the night before Jim Collins flight, the final waypoint
Speaker 1: was shifted back again, back over Mount Erebus, and nobody
Speaker 1: told Jim Collins. The public hearings in Peter Mah's courtroom
Speaker 1: began in July nineteen eighty seven, months after the air
Speaker 1: New Zealand's lawyers told Man that the waypoint change was
Speaker 1: irrelevant for two reasons. The first reason, they said, is
Speaker 1: that Jim Collins would have been briefed that his flight
Speaker 1: path went over Mount Erebus. You see, it might have
Speaker 1: looked like a sensible decision to change the flight path
Speaker 1: to over McMurdo Sound, but it wasn't. In fact, it
Speaker 1: was a mistake, a typographical error when the coordinates got
Speaker 1: transferred to a new computer system for over a year,
Speaker 1: the airline said nobody noticed that mistake. The officer who
Speaker 1: briefed the pilots told Peter marn that he always believed
Speaker 1: the flight path went over Mount Erebus. The executive pilots
Speaker 1: agreed nobody had ever noticed that the waypoint coordinates took
Speaker 1: them over McMurdo Sound instead. Then Peter Mahn heard from
Speaker 1: the non executive pilots who told a very different story.
Speaker 1: They all said they had been briefed to fly down
Speaker 1: McMurdo Sound. This all gave Peter Marn a problem. He
Speaker 1: put it in diplomatic language.
Speaker 4: I could not help but be struck by the direct
Speaker 4: conflict of evidence which had emerged.
Speaker 1: What he meant was someone was telling lies. Marn believed
Speaker 1: the non executive pilots one had been at the same
Speaker 1: briefing as Jim Collins. He told Marn there'd been shown
Speaker 1: print outs of the coordinates given to other flights. Marn
Speaker 1: understood what must have happened. Jim Collins, the habitual note taker,
Speaker 1: wrote down the coordinates during the briefing. The night before
Speaker 1: the flight, when his teenage daughters saw him drawing lines
Speaker 1: on a map he was plotting his flight path. It
Speaker 1: took him down Murdo Sound. Then, on the morning of
Speaker 1: the flight, Collins was given a print out of the
Speaker 1: coordinates to enter into the plane's computer. He assumed they
Speaker 1: must be the same coordinates he had seen at his briefing.
Speaker 1: Why wouldn't they be Remember when Colins said.
Speaker 2: We're twenty six miles north.
Speaker 1: Collins was looking at the cockpit display, which told him
Speaker 1: he was twenty six miles north of the next waypoint.
Speaker 1: Because he had plotted his route the night before. He
Speaker 1: thought that meant he was over the water, but no,
Speaker 1: the coordinates had been changed. It actually meant they were
Speaker 1: about to hit a mountain. It seemed to Peter Marn
Speaker 1: that Air New Zealand had made a hideous mistake. They'd
Speaker 1: briefed Jim Collins on one flight path, then changed it
Speaker 1: and didn't tell him, And it seemed to Marn that
Speaker 1: they were trying to cover up their mistake by lying
Speaker 1: that Collins had been briefed he'd be flying over Mount Erebus.
Speaker 1: One piece of evidence would confirm what Collins had been
Speaker 1: told that his briefing. The notes he had made. Colin's ringbinder, remember,
Speaker 1: had been found on the mountain side, perfectly readable.
Speaker 4: Wow.
Speaker 1: But when Peter Marn got his hands on that ringbinder,
Speaker 1: it was empty. The pages had been damaged by kerosene
Speaker 1: and someone at Air New Zealand had thrown them away.
Speaker 1: I said there were two reasons the airline claimed the
Speaker 1: change in waypoint was irrelevant. So what if Jim Collins
Speaker 1: believed his flight path lay twenty five miles west of
Speaker 1: Mount Erebus, if he hadn't been flying too low, he
Speaker 1: would still have passed safely over the top. The minimum
Speaker 1: safe altitude, remember, was sixteen thousand feet. If Collins had
Speaker 1: followed the regulations, he wouldn't have hit the mountain, simple
Speaker 1: as that. So about those regulations, Peter Mahn noticed once
Speaker 1: again that Air New Zealand's executives were saying one thing
Speaker 1: and the non executive pilots were saying something else. The
Speaker 1: executives insisted that the minimum safe altitude was sacrisanct. The
Speaker 1: others said everyone knew those flights to Antarctica flew low.
Speaker 1: They were sightseeing flights. You can't see many sights from
Speaker 1: sixteen thousand feet. The non executive pilots told Peter Mann
Speaker 1: they had been briefed that they could fly as low
Speaker 1: as they wanted as long as they cleared it with
Speaker 1: the American radar station at McMurdo, which is exactly what
Speaker 1: Jim Collins had done.
Speaker 2: We will be taking advantage of the raidar facilities at
Speaker 2: McMurdo for letdown.
Speaker 1: Once again, Petermann was struck by the lack of documentary
Speaker 1: evidence about what had been said to Collins at his briefing.
Speaker 1: It wasn't just the pages from Colin's ring binder, that
Speaker 1: had mysteriously disappeared. The first officer had forgotten his briefing
Speaker 1: notes at home. The day after the crash, someone from
Speaker 1: Air New Zealand called on his grieving widow and took
Speaker 1: those notes away. Then the company lost them. Soon after
Speaker 1: the crash, the airline's CEO ordered that all relevant documents
Speaker 1: be gathered together and surplus documents put through a shredder.
Speaker 1: His rationale, he said, was to avoid any leaks. But
Speaker 1: was it only surplus documents that were being shredded or
Speaker 1: inconvenient ones. Some inconvenient documents remained at large, like magazine
Speaker 1: articles about the sightseeing flights, which made it very clear
Speaker 1: they were flying far lower than the minimum's safe altitude.
Speaker 1: If that was strictly forbidden, Why had no executives taken
Speaker 1: action after seeing these articles? The executive said, we never
Speaker 1: saw them. We had no idea. One of those articles
Speaker 1: was by the boss of the McDonell Douglas Corporation, which
Speaker 1: made the plane that Air New Zealand flew to Antarctica.
Speaker 1: In a trade magazine, he published an enthusiastic account of
Speaker 1: flying low down McMurdo sound. He sent a copy to
Speaker 1: the CEO of Air New Zealand. When the CEO gave
Speaker 1: evidence in Peter Mann's courtroom, he insisted he had never
Speaker 1: seen it. He doesn't read all his mail, he explained.
Speaker 1: Then it transpired that Air New Zealand's marketing department had
Speaker 1: printed a million copies of this article and sent one
Speaker 1: to every household in New Zealand. Peter Mann asked the
Speaker 1: CEO to explain. Marn recalled.
Speaker 4: He gave no verbal answer. He simply turned towards me
Speaker 4: and spread his arms outwards in a despairing gesture. He
Speaker 4: was indicating his total lack of comprehension that such a
Speaker 4: thing could have happened. I knew the feeling.
Speaker 1: The airline's case was falling apart. Jim Collins did have
Speaker 1: permission to fly low. He didn't know his flight path
Speaker 1: went over Erebus. But there remained one final mystery to unravel.
Speaker 1: How had Jim Collins failed to see Mount Erebus when
Speaker 1: it was right in front of him. The answer seemed obvious,
Speaker 1: Collins must have been flying through cloud. The transcript of
Speaker 1: the cockpit voice recording was damning a bit thick here, Ahber,
Speaker 1: but that line in the transcript came as a surprise
Speaker 1: to other pilots who'd listened to the recording. The quality
Speaker 1: of that recording was poor. Many parts were hard to
Speaker 1: make out. They didn't remember hearing anything like that, and anyway,
Speaker 1: nobody on the flight deck was called Bert. Remember what
Speaker 1: the police had found among the wreckage on the side
Speaker 1: of the mountain. Passengers cameras, some were undamaged, and the
Speaker 1: films inside were developed. They showed the plane hadn't been
Speaker 1: in thick cloud at all, far from it. Jim Collins
Speaker 1: had descended below the clouds and visibility was clear for
Speaker 1: miles around. That made Petermann suspicious about the transcript, so
Speaker 1: he flew to America to listen with an expert. The
Speaker 1: quality was poor, but it didn't sound like bit thicker
Speaker 1: a Bert. The expert thought he heard this is Cape byrd.
Speaker 1: So Marn arranged to be flown to Antarctica, following the
Speaker 1: exact same route as Jim Collins. At the moment of
Speaker 1: the disputed line and the transcript man looked out of
Speaker 1: the cockpit window, he saw a cape. It wasn't Cape Bird.
Speaker 1: That was twenty five miles west on the flight path.
Speaker 1: Jim Collins thought he was following, but by tragic coincidence.
Speaker 1: This cape just happened to look very much like cape Bird.
Speaker 1: It was confirmation bias twice over. The pilots assumed they
Speaker 1: were flying over cape Bird, so they saw cape Bird.
Speaker 1: The chief inspector assumed the pilots were flying through cloud,
Speaker 1: so he heard a bit thicker a Bert. Still, though
Speaker 1: that didn't solve the mystery, it deepened it. If visibility
Speaker 1: was good, how on earth had Jim Collins failed to
Speaker 1: see Mount Erebus Cautionary tales will be back in a moment.
Speaker 1: Most of the senior pilots had turned their backs on
Speaker 1: Jim Collins' widow, Maria, but one had not, the man
Speaker 1: who taught Jim Collins to fly.
Speaker 3: This isn't Jim Maria. This is not Jim's behavior. Something's wrong.
Speaker 3: I'm going to find out.
Speaker 1: The pilot's name was Gordon Vetti. He talked to experienced
Speaker 1: Antarctic pilots who told him about a phenomenon called whiteout.
Speaker 1: The Air New Zealand pilots who flew to Antarctica, including
Speaker 1: Vetti himself, had never been there before, and nobody at
Speaker 1: Air New Zealand had briefed them about whiteout. The more
Speaker 1: Vetty learned the more horrified he became at the risk
Speaker 1: hid unknown taken. White Out, Vetti discovered, is a peculiar
Speaker 1: visual illusion that can happen in polar regions in overcast conditions.
Speaker 1: When the land is white and the clouds are white
Speaker 1: and the light shines in a certain way, you lose
Speaker 1: all ability to perceive depth or distance. One expert told Vetti,
Speaker 1: It's like being inside a big milk bottle. It can
Speaker 1: come on suddenly and you don't necessarily realize that anything's
Speaker 1: wrong until you walk into a snowbank, or fall into
Speaker 1: a hole, or crash or plane into a frozen mountain.
Speaker 1: Gordon Vetti understood what had happened in the final moments
Speaker 1: of the flight.
Speaker 3: I don't like this.
Speaker 4: We're twenty six miles north. We'll have to climb.
Speaker 1: Out of this, climb out of this. What did Jim
Speaker 1: Collins want to climb out of? Vetti says it must
Speaker 1: have been that disconcerting sense of being in a milk bottle.
Speaker 1: Collins was below the cloud. He could see for miles
Speaker 1: to the left and right, but he hadn't been briefed
Speaker 1: about white out. He had no idea that right in
Speaker 1: front of him he'd be unable to tell a flat
Speaker 1: expanse of frozen water from the rising slopes of a
Speaker 1: frozen hillside. It just have sensed that something was off,
Speaker 1: so his instinct was to climb, but it was too late.
Speaker 1: Vetty shudders to think of it.
Speaker 3: If I had been in their position at that time,
Speaker 3: I would probably have been misled the same respect as
Speaker 3: they were, and now myself may well have crashed on
Speaker 3: Mount Erebus.
Speaker 1: Gordon Vetti wanted to make sure Peter Marn knew about
Speaker 1: white out, so he flew in an expert at his
Speaker 1: own expense, to give evidence to Marn's Royal Commission. Later,
Speaker 1: when Marn himself visited Antarctica, the Australian Air Force offered
Speaker 1: him a lift home. The crew were experienced Antarctic flyers
Speaker 1: and they'd been following the news about Marn's Royal Commission.
Speaker 1: They invited Marm to the cockpit for takeoff. They wanted
Speaker 1: to show him something. The day was overcast. The pilots
Speaker 1: flew towards a ridge of snow and pointed out how
Speaker 1: it ended in a black, rocky outcrop.
Speaker 4: Marn recalls could just make out the top of the ridge.
Speaker 1: Then they told him, now raise your hand to cover
Speaker 1: that black, rocky outcrop.
Speaker 4: The top of the snow ridge disappeared, and stuntly.
Speaker 1: All that Marn could see was undifferentiated white. He was stunned.
Speaker 1: It was one thing to hear about white out from
Speaker 1: an expert, quite another to experience it for himself. The
Speaker 1: Australian crew were satisfied. That's the illusion that doomed Jim Collins.
Speaker 1: Marn had spent months growing more and more frustrated that
Speaker 1: Air New Zealand executives were trying to pull the wool
Speaker 1: over his eyes. He appreciated that these young men from
Speaker 1: another country's air force wanted to help him understand. When
Speaker 1: he wrote up the findings of his Royal Commission, he
Speaker 1: thanked every one of them by name and rank. Peter
Speaker 1: Mahn's findings turned the Chief Inspector's report on its head.
Speaker 1: The cause of the accident, said Marn, wasn't Jim Collins
Speaker 1: flying too low. It was Air New Zealand failing to
Speaker 1: brief him properly about the risk of whiteout, and failing
Speaker 1: to tell him that they'd changed his waypoint coordinates between
Speaker 1: the briefing and the flight. The Chief Inspector had heaped
Speaker 1: all the blame on Jim Collins. Marn said Collins deserved
Speaker 1: no blame at all. Not everyone agrees. On internet discussion boards,
Speaker 1: pilots still expressed strong views either way. Did Collins rely
Speaker 1: too much on the computerized navigation system to tell him
Speaker 1: where he was? Peter Mann didn't think so. He points
Speaker 1: out how accurate that system is, although perhaps we've since
Speaker 1: grown more mistrustful of the idea that the machine could
Speaker 1: never fly us into a mountain. The Distinguished Air Marshal,
Speaker 1: who had served as Man's technical advisor, thought that the
Speaker 1: judge had overstepped he reckoned Collins was maybe ten percent
Speaker 1: to blame. As it happens, I too have strong views
Speaker 1: on the question of how much to blame Jim Collins.
Speaker 1: I think it's the wrong question. The right question, as
Speaker 1: with every plane that crashes on this show, is what
Speaker 1: can we learn. When you read Peter Man's report, you
Speaker 1: get a sense that he's writing in a different era.
Speaker 1: You can feel Mann groping to towards concepts that in
Speaker 1: nineteen eighty one, accident investigators didn't yet have the vocabulary
Speaker 1: to articulate concepts like cognitive biases and human factors. Such
Speaker 1: concepts have since been popularized by thinkers such as James Reason,
Speaker 1: a psychologist and expert on human error. Both Peter Mann
Speaker 1: and Gordon Vetti instinctively grasped an idea that was then
Speaker 1: very new, that organizational failings can set a trap into
Speaker 1: which even the most skilled of pilots might fall. James
Speaker 1: Reason said that the Man Report was ten years ahead
Speaker 1: of its time. Peter Mann was a subtle and elegant writer.
Speaker 1: You'll often find him raising an eyebrow through his prose,
Speaker 1: making it clear what he thinks without spelling it out.
Speaker 1: When he wrote up his commission's findings, he could have
Speaker 1: crafted a memorable turn of phrase that left no doubt
Speaker 1: air New Zealand executives had lied to him without actually
Speaker 1: saying it. But Marn was too angry to pull his punches. Instead,
Speaker 1: he crafted a memorable turn of phrase that made the
Speaker 1: accusation explicit.
Speaker 4: I am forced reluctantly to say that I had to
Speaker 4: listen to an orchestrated litany of lies.
Speaker 1: An orchestrated litany of lies. Devastating, satisfying, but unwise. Marn
Speaker 1: was a judge, but he wasn't writing as a judge.
Speaker 1: He was writing as a Royal commissioner that mattered. The
Speaker 1: verdicts of a judge can be appealed. There was no
Speaker 1: legal mechanism to appeal the findings of a royal commission
Speaker 1: It's hard to imagine that Air New Zealand would have
Speaker 1: got far if they could have appealed.
Speaker 4: What would they have said?
Speaker 1: That it was an improvised litany of lies, a choreographed
Speaker 1: cacophony of cock ups. The point was that they couldn't appeal.
Speaker 1: Air New Zealand's lawyers found a clever way to fight back.
Speaker 1: They took Marm to court for breaching the principles of
Speaker 1: natural justice by accusing the company of a cover up
Speaker 1: in a way that gave them no right to respond.
Speaker 1: The case went to the Privy Council, the highest court
Speaker 1: in the land. The Privy Council bent over backwards to
Speaker 1: praise Marm's investigative work. Brilliant, they said, but agreed that
Speaker 1: Air New Zealand had a point. Legally Marn had overstepped.
Speaker 1: Marn was devastated. He resigned as a judge. His health
Speaker 1: declined rapidly, and he died soon after, aged just sixty two.
Speaker 1: The legal wrangles created just enough MRK to let Air
Speaker 1: new Zealand Wriggle off the hook. It wasn't until twenty nineteen,
Speaker 1: the fortieth anniversary of the disaster, that New Zealand's government
Speaker 1: formally accepted Marn's report and apologized for Air New Zealand's
Speaker 1: role in the crash. Gordon Vetti, too, found that Air
Speaker 1: New Zealand were in no mood to forgive and forget
Speaker 1: his research into Whiteout. He says, I'd hoped that we
Speaker 1: might all be able to admit that in ignorance they
Speaker 1: made a terrible mistake and get on with rebuilding and
Speaker 1: learning from our mistakes. Nopevett hounded out of his job.
Speaker 3: I am somewhat said that the price I've had to
Speaker 3: pay for my attempts to find the truth has been
Speaker 3: much greater than I expected.
Speaker 1: Gordon Vetti and Peter Marn are the heroes of the
Speaker 1: Erebus affair, But if the question is what can we learn,
Speaker 1: perhaps they too have something to teach us. From Gordon
Speaker 1: Vetti we get the sad lesson that seeking the truth
Speaker 1: can make you powerful enemies. And from Peter Marn, tempting
Speaker 1: as it is to speak the truth, sometimes it's wiser
Speaker 1: to let the truth speak for itself. For a full
Speaker 1: list of our sources, see the show not at Timharford
Speaker 1: dot com. Cautionary Tales is written by me Tim Harford
Speaker 1: with Andrew Wright, Alice Fines, and Ryan Dilly. It's produced
Speaker 1: by Georgia Mills and Marilyn Rust. The sound design and
Speaker 1: original music are the work of Pascal Wise. Additional sound
Speaker 1: design by Carlos San Juan at Brain Audio and Dan Jackson.
Speaker 1: Bend A. Dafh Haffrey edited the scripts. It features the
Speaker 1: voice talents of Melanie Guttridge, Genevieve Gaunt, Stella Harford, Messee Munroe,
Speaker 1: Jamal Westman, and Rufus Wright. The show also wouldn't have
Speaker 1: been possible without the work of Jacob Weisberg, Greta Cohne,
Speaker 1: Eric Sandler, Carrie Brody, Christina Sullivan, Kira Posey, and Owen Miller.
Speaker 1: Cautionary Tales is a production of Pushkin Industries. If you
Speaker 1: like the show, please please remember to share, rate, and review.
Speaker 1: It really does make a difference to us and if
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Speaker 1: bonus audio episode, video episode, and members only newsletter every month.
Speaker 1: Why not tryin the Cautionary Club. To sign up, head
Speaker 1: to patreon dot com Slash Cautionary Club. That's Patreon, p
Speaker 1: A t R e o N dot com Slash Cautionary
Speaker 1: Club