Yet the flight crews, briefing officers, and publicity staff all knew that the track ran down McMurdo Sound. If the airline’s testimony was correct, the airline, its flight planners, and management staff all still believed the track lay over Mt Erebus. Collins’ comment to his daughters the night before, that that would be where the aircraft was to operate. This facilitated sightseeing.įor the next 14 months flights flew this altered route, and flew sightseeing missions along it, and it became such that crews would be briefed on this route that terminated at the Dailey Islands. track,” allowed the crew to steer simply by selecting directions to fly at random, that is, pointing the aircraft in the direction they wanted to go. It became almost normal practice to disengage this mode of navigation, known as “navigation (or nav.) mode” and fly in “heading mode” which, rather than fly along the “nav. But previous aircraft seldom had to fly all the way to that point. This produced an end waypoint near the Dailey Islands, and was sometimes referred to as the “Dailey Islands” waypoint. One of the reasons that no-one saw this as an error was that it seemed a logical change to make shifting the route away from an active volcano and down over the flat sea ice of McMurdo Sound actually produced a better, safer result. The effect of this erroneous keystroke was to shift the route nearly 30 miles to the west, so that it ran down McMurdo Sound. At this time, an error was made the data entry operator keyed a 4 instead of a 6 into the machine, and this error had never been noticed as such. Then, some 18 months after Antarctic flights began, 14 months prior to the accident, the airline computerised its method of storing and producing flight plans. Most of these initial flights were able to operate away from the planned nav track in brilliant weather conditions ensuring good surface and horizon definition. Originally, the route was over Mt Erebus, and the first few flights were planned and operated that way. But in fact, what they had done was to shift the route from McMurdo Sound, to over Mt Erebus, a change of nearly 30 nautical miles. Now, according to the airline witnesses, the navigation staff always knew the track ran more or less directly over Mt Erebus, and the shifting of the waypoint some two miles would still run the track more or less over the volcano. In their mind, they were only shifting the final Antarctic waypoint about two miles, which was about the expected error usually found in flights of a similar duration. On the night before the flight, flight planners made what they thought was a small correction to an earlier mistake made some months previously, when the flight plans were computerised. He described McMurdo Sound, and its western side, saying that the aircraft would keep close to that side. Later, using the co-ordinates from that flight plan, Captain Jim Collins would plot the route on a chart at home so he could show his daughters where he would be going. They were also shown a copy of the current computer generated flight plan. They expected this because 19 days earlier, in a briefing given to them by flight operations personnel, they were shown via an audio-visual presentation scenes depicting flight down McMurdo Sound. They expected that, provided they had performed this data checking task with no error that the aircraft’s computer brain would, if left to itself, fly down the 40 mile wide McMurdo Sound. One pilot would load the route then both pilots would check that the on-board computer entries matched the hard copy co-ordinates on the flight plan, which were in the latitude and longitude format.
EREBUS ANSWERS SERIES
This involved checking a series of positions along the route, known as waypoints, between the flight plan and the on-board computer. The flight crew of TE901 had an additional chore to perform, to check the pre-programmed flight route provided by the Navigation section which was stored within the aircraft on board library. Captain Vette Receives an IFALPA Presidentialĭespite advances in technology, this procedure has changed little in decades.Studying the Effects of the Recovery Operation.U.S Policy Regarding Aviation in Antarctica, 1968.Marketing Antarctica - Expert Commentators.
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