Keep Warm

"f86sabre" (f86sabre) 12/18/2016 at 17:47 • Filed to: Planelopnik

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I hope all of you are warmer than this abandoned Antarctic Connie

gmctavish needs more space > f86sabre 12/18/2016 at 17:50

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Abandoned planes like this fascinate me. They’re like shipwrecks, but you can see them without being a scuba diver or something

Bandit - destroyed his car > f86sabre 12/18/2016 at 17:58

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Why hasn’t someone salvaged it? Constellations can’t be cheap so I figured someone would have tried by now.

sonicgabe > f86sabre 12/18/2016 at 18:05

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Yeah it was like 8.1 here today, so we’ll be fine. Oh wait, that’s a typo, sorry. It was 81 here today. The sun was out. Had to turn the AC in th house on. Shorts and flip-flops in full effect. Good times.

Nick Has an Exocet > f86sabre 12/18/2016 at 18:12

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http://www.messynessychic.com/2014/02/19/abandoned-in-antarctica-the-1970s-airplane-buried-in-snow/

f86sabre > sonicgabe 12/18/2016 at 18:25

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65 here.

f86sabre > Bandit - destroyed his car 12/18/2016 at 18:26

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Antarctica is a tough place to mount a salvage mission.

gogmorgo - rowing gears in a Grand Cherokee > f86sabre 12/18/2016 at 18:26

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It’s not been too bad out the last couple days. Spent some time outside last night in a Tshirt, even.

sonicgabe > f86sabre 12/18/2016 at 19:00

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I think we’re eating our Christmas late lunch/early dinner meal thing outside on our deck.

Deal Killer - Powered by Focus > f86sabre 12/18/2016 at 19:55

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Yeah, pulling planes out of the frozen wastes can end up a disaster. I’d recommend against it.

f86sabre > Deal Killer - Powered by Focus 12/18/2016 at 19:58

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Still makes me sad. Total human factors failure.

someassemblyrequired > Bandit - destroyed his car 12/18/2016 at 20:24

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Enough of them preserved as well. Most old airframes are pretty inexpensive - preserving one takes space and lots of cash, and they are high maintenance beasts to start with. Much easier to find one stateside.

someassemblyrequired > f86sabre 12/18/2016 at 20:27

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Yep. There was a DC-10 crash into Mount Erebus not far from where that photo was taken. They recovered the bodies as best they could, but left the wreckage, which the wife says usually emerges in the summer there. Apparently the job of recovery was so challenging (and this was during their summer) that they ended up salvaging the booze that survived the crash from the drink carts.

gmporschenut also a fan of hondas > Deal Killer - Powered by Focus 12/18/2016 at 20:36

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Ran when parked.

very sad. I would have thought the engines would have been worth saving.

I know a guy who buys, and then drives salvage cars. And he was talking shit how they’re “as good as new” to a frined that runs an auto body show. and the shop owner was like “...ah no”

Bourbon&JellyBeans > gmctavish needs more space 12/18/2016 at 20:47

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You oughta visit the Aral Sea.

gmctavish needs more space > Bourbon&JellyBeans 12/18/2016 at 20:55

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This is now on my list of places to go

Distraxi's idea of perfection is a Jagroen > someassemblyrequired 12/18/2016 at 21:09

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There’s a lot of information on the Erebus recovery operation here ; it was a pretty horrific job which scarred the NZ Police and US Navy volunteers for life.

Plus there was a really good doco on it - trailer here and if you have a region blocker you can see the whole thing here .

f86sabre > someassemblyrequired 12/18/2016 at 21:18

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I’m generally up on most major air crashes, but that was a new one to me. Just read the wiki page. Holy crap, that was just awful and the task before the recovery crew was huge.

someassemblyrequired > f86sabre 12/18/2016 at 23:30

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Yeah I’d not heard about it until I started dating my wife, and she mentioned that there was a civilian jet that had wrecked near McMurdo in the 70s and they’d just left it there. I’ll admit I checked Google next available opportunity, because I didn’t believe her. No way they’d run civilian flights over Antarctica, but I guess they were quite popular.

Looks like the movie Distraxi mentioned on the recovery is available for free on Amazon Prime here in the US.

someassemblyrequired > Distraxi's idea of perfection is a Jagroen 12/18/2016 at 23:42

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Thanks for the links. The kind of work those folks do is tough and takes a mental toll, especially at that scale. Wife job means she has been involved in some recovery work, though not for an incident that big. She says it’s tough to detach, but you look at the body as just a vessel, and focus on the closure that you can provide to a family and if you’re lucky on the people you are able to save. Looks like the full movie is available here on Amazon Prime, I’ll definitely check it out.

Distraxi's idea of perfection is a Jagroen > someassemblyrequired 12/18/2016 at 23:54

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The report of the inquiry into the accident makes interesting reading too. In assigning the blame primarily to organisational factors rather than individual human error, the judge who wrote the report went some way towards establishing the groundwork for modern risk management practices. He also came up with some pretty good quotes:

“The palpably false sections of evidence which I heard could not have been the result of mistake, or faulty recollection. They originated, I am compelled to say, in a pre-determined plan of deception. They were very clearly part of an attempt to conceal a series of disastrous administrative blunders and so… I am forced reluctantly to say that I had to listen to an orchestrated litany of lies.”

“Orchestrated litany of lies” has entered the New Zealand lexicon.

someassemblyrequired > Distraxi's idea of perfection is a Jagroen 12/19/2016 at 16:17

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I’ll admit that I’m surprised that there were not criminal charges stemming from the findings in that report (and that he lost his Privy Council appeal). Would have probably been one of those “everyone is going to jail” situations in the U.S., especially given the destruction of evidence, but it sounds like Mahon’s report is the accepted version of events in NZ, even though legally that’s not the case.

Distraxi's idea of perfection is a Jagroen > someassemblyrequired 12/19/2016 at 18:24

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At the time, Air NZ was a state owned company. The government of the day, led by an autocratic and vindictive Prime Minister (we had our Trump years a few decades ago), was extremely unhappy about being basically called out for incompetence and a coverup, and decided to get round that by making it personal.

Unfortunately, Mahon had got sufficiently incensed by the coverup that he went too far in his report. The quote above is a case in point - he had no solid evidence of a “pre-determined plan of deception”, he just concluded that the BS he was being told had to be coordinated. So the government were able to hang him.

The Privy Council, who like the US Supreme Court tend to focus more on the letter of the law than on the actual facts, ruled against him. But their verdict wasn’t that he was wrong as such, but that he hadn’t followed due process in accusing Air NZ of conspiracy. His reputation was ruined and his career finished.

Time has changed attitudes, however. Nowadays it’s generally accepted that Mahon was right, and nowadays in the same situation, I expect management heads would roll.

It’s worth noting in passing, by the way,that the website I reference above, and a lot of the other material on the subject, are maintained by the pilots union, who are not exactly unbiased when it comes down to matters of “pilot error” vs “not pilot error”.

someassemblyrequired > Distraxi's idea of perfection is a Jagroen 12/20/2016 at 00:03

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Ah the fact that Air NZ was state owned makes a lot of sense. From what I’ve read of the report “incensed” is the right description, and it sounds like history has judged that he was right to feel that way. Surprised that NZ retained the right of appeal to the Privy Council that late - I thought Canada was late in getting rid of that in 1981, but in New Zealand it looks like it lasted quite a bit longer.

The disclaimer is probably valid, but one of the salient points that I took away from that documentary you pointed me to was the police noting the loss of the pages out of the pilot’s briefing book. Those don’t just dissapear if it’s a clear case of pilot error (since they would exonerate the airline), and it’s pretty clear from the CVR that they were becoming concerned about their situation prior to the GPWS going off, to the point that another minute or two might have allowed them time to discern their actual position.

Distraxi's idea of perfection is a Jagroen > someassemblyrequired 12/20/2016 at 06:15

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We actually hung onto the Privy Council much longer than that - only got rid of it in 2004. The argument for keeping it was that NZ has too small a population to guarantee a deep enough bench of high quality judges to staff a Supreme Court without compromising the “working” courts. Plus there was some concern that the same small population, with consequent intertwining of the legal, political, and business elites, would make it hard for a domestic supreme court to remain apolitical. Against that was the argument that you aren’t a grown up nation if you’re still relying on Mom to settle your arguments; in the end, this side won.

There’s still some disagreement as to whether getting rid of it was a good move - the Supreme Court is much more activist than the Privy Council ever was, which is a good or bad thing depending on your perspective.

As to the pilot error thing, I think it’s pretty clear that there was a raft of dumb shit going on in the organisation which led to the plane being in the situation it got into, and that criminal activity went on to hide that after the fact. And in that respect the union are absolutely right to celebrate Mahon’s rejection of the aircrew as scapegoats.

On the other hand, my father in law was at the time flying a desk for the Air Force, but only a few years earlier had been a longhaul navigator for Air NZ. He knew the Erebus crew personally, knew NZ civilian flight practices, and if he’d made some slightly different career decisions, could easily have been on that flight. And he always held the crew liable. His attitude, apart from the basic “your plane, your responsibility” principle, was that as soon as they entered whiteout they should have aborted the sightseeing part of the flight and gone straight to altitude; he reckoned it was irresponsible and against policy to be below the altitude of terrain with no viz and no external navigation aids, even if you thought the terrain in question was 100 miles away. He held that there was plenty of blame to go round, but that the crew carried the lion’s share.

He was a cantankerous old bastard, and it’s easy to be a stickler after the fact, but I’m not in a position to completely disregard his view, particularly as it was the only time I heard him take a “the crew screwed up” position on pretty much anything other than open/shut pilot error crashes.

someassemblyrequired > Distraxi's idea of perfection is a Jagroen 12/20/2016 at 12:54

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That’s a great line about your mom settling arguments. Reminds me of the time I went to visit my good friend at law school, now a Canadian politician. He introduced his Kiwi flatmate (with her own political aspirations) as “the future Mayor of New Zealand.”

Your father-in-law’s perspective is one I’d have a hard time arguing - and had Air NZ not tried for a coverup, that view might have been the original and final conclusion.