Vote for which plane is the worst. Propaganda will be below the cut.
Which sucks more?
The Dassault Mercure
The DC-10
Voting ended onMay 23
Propaganda for the Dassault Mercure:
@specter-177: "Basically France's FIRST repsonse to the 737, but completely inadequate as a competitor, as while it could carry more passengers, it had a very short range (half the 737-200), which limited foreign sales, and only 12 were built, though it did stay in service for more than 20 years."
My additional commentary: This shitfuck of a regional jet not only didn't sell a single unit internationally, it only sold to Air Inter. Air Inter.
Propaganda for the DC-10:
@airbus-a380-800: "we all know about the two accidents that were caused by a poorly designed cargo door and the disaster where the engine fell off (!!) but i think other people rarely appreciate the fact that the one and only fatal concorde accident was CAUSED BY A DC-10. a piece of a dc-10 fell off on the runway and got run over by the concorde. there's not many planes that have the distinction of bringing down OTHER AIRPLANES with their structural problems"
@hesitant-airplane (abridged by me lol, thank you for the rant): "the doors weren't properly closed in two separate accidents. no one was able to see that because the latching system was in no way indicating if the door was closed properly or not. both accidents happened in the 70s. that latching system had to break in TWO DIFFERENT FLIGHTS before they did anything to stop this from happening. the company claimed to have "fixed" the issue, until TWO years later a worse accident happens with another DC-10 and everyone dies. and the cause is, again, the door hadn't closed properly. I mean, what the hell? they had fixed it? why would it happen again? ah, of course, safety is overlooked when there's profit...
I am not a fan of the tail engine. I know it's not the only aircraft with three engines, and with an engine on the tail, but I just hate this. both aesthetically and also because when the two accidents i mentioned earlier in the post happened, it immediately became unusable. and it broke in other accidents too. for example united airlines flight 232 happened because that one ugly engine suffered a failure. because of it the plane couldn't be controlled. why would anyone build a plane where if one engine has a failure the whole plane has to go with it?"
@milfmaekar: "in the late 70s my dad witnessed graffiti in a public bathroom which read "fly McDonnell Douglas, while stocks last" and everyone called it the DC Deathtrap. I don't think it gets much worse than that"
Anonymous: "does this really need an explanation? it's the dc-10."
@flavinbagel: "On November 20th, 1998, Pixar wide released its sophomore animated feature, "A Bug's Life," a lighthearted but surprisingly poignant family film about revolution in the face of seemingly unstoppable oppression. Good stuff, if only Dreamworks hadn't just released "Antz" a month prior, beating Pixar to the punch with a film that asks, "What if an ant was Woody Allen?" The McDonnell Douglas DC-10 is a bit like Antz (1998), if an animated Woody Allen movie was capable of claiming more than 1,200 human lives. Just as Lockheed Martin was poised to unveil one of the finest, most refined, and elegantly perfected airframes of the civil aviation world in its iconic L-1011 Tristar, McDonnell Douglas drops in at the 11th hour, trousers down, and unveils a trijet that is cheaper, shoddier, and, in an industry with no appetite for patience, available NOW. The DC-10 consumed the widebody airliner market, elbowing out Lockheed's pride and joy from market share and cementing its own legacy as the Plane That Couldn't Stop Falling Apart. Features included cargo doors that blew out, tail engines that exploded taking all hydraulics with them, and wing engines that liked to take little flights of their own. The legacy of the DC-10's design is STILL causing death and destruction as recently as December 2025. Embittered, Lockheed Martin swore off civil aviation projects for good, and thanks to a shoddy repair job, the L-1011 wasn't the only iconic aircraft cut short in its career by the DC-10 as it brought the beloved Concorde to its knees with timing that would expediently kill the supersonic jet age, along with 113 people. (Does the DC-10 hold the non-military record for the most casualties caused by an airplane they weren't even on?)"
Vote for which plane is the worst. Propaganda will be below the cut.
Which sucks more?
The Tupolev Tu-104
The Sukhoi SuperJet
Voting ended onMay 23
Propaganda for the Tu-104:
@imperialcyane: "While it didn’t have the metal fatigue issues of the contemporary Comet, it did have highly dangerous stall characteristics—specifically a tendency to stall without warning and pitch up dramatically when doing so. 16 out of 96 built were lost in accidents."
Propaganda for the Sukhoi SuperJet:
@me, I wrote this: "The Sukhoi SuperJet is the definition of "we have A320 at home!" Ostensibly designed by Russia's nightmare conglomerate of every Soviet design bureau during the period of time where they were trying to get along with everybody and not bombing the shit out of Ukraine, the SSJ was marketed on its "advanced" parts acquired from countries all over the Western world. Not even considering how Russia was about to shoot itself in the foot by getting sanctioned out the ass by every single one of those countries, the SSJ wasn't even a big enough project for them to design custom parts, so all this shit was just off-the-shelf components you could get at the proverbial aircraft building hardware store. Still these planes managed to have so much downtime due to maintenance and lack of spare parts that a bunch of airlines that ordered them just straight up returned them."
Anonymous (edited for length): "The Sukhoi Superjet 100 is indeed, a plane that exists. It might even be one of the planes of all time. The Russians looked at their civil airplane market post Soviet era (nothing) and said, "Мы строим хороший самолёт. Очень хороший самолёт, да?" and then proceeded to craft a horrific Undertale-esque amalgamate of a jetliner from parts that originally were produced in the west, somehow creating a plane that would tragically be less than the sum of its parts.
The weakest link in your code is as strong as your program will ever be. Safety-critical computer programs NEED redundancy. If you're going to forgo mechanical interlocking safety systems, you better be damn sure your code has been tested out the ass. Airbus is capable of utilizing fly-by-wire by having so, SO many redundancies and altered control states to ensure power is always present and that the pilot can fly the plane, and the computers default to pilot input when requested. So, naturally, the Russians saw this and was like, "Ах... Я просто не буду следовать этой идее. Безопасность — это западный идеал, понимаете." The Sukhoi had several flight "modes" in a similar vein to an Airbus...or rather, it had two. You had Normal Mode, and the "Get fucked you're flying the damn plane" mode (i.e.: Direct Mode). There was NO in-between. A glitch or mismatch of data that would usually send an Airbus into Alternate Law would cause the Sukhoi to simply give up and switch to Direct Mode. Unprepared to take control of the plane? The Sukhoi would simply say Skill Issue. There also was no way to return to Normal Mode if you managed to fix whatever had sent the plane into Direct, unlike an Airbus which can potentially manage a return to Alternate Law from Direct Law. You'd BREATHE the wrong way in the cockpit and the Sukhoi would immediately have a panic attack worse than my PMDD off my meds. These reversions from Normal to Direct were STUPID common.
Thanks to the Sukhoi being built from off-the-shelf western parts, all from different manufacturers, some of the electronics required extra help to talk to one another. Okay, no biggie, this happens in computing all the time. However, for reasons we will never know, UAC decided to route EVERY SINGLE DATA INPUT into a pair of central units, called the EIUs. These units translated everything into a protocol the computers could understand, while also creating a massive weakpoint. Just as how we are not immune to propaganda, the EIUs are not immune to lightning. Big shocker, a lightning strike has a teeny chance of shutting off the Super Important computer units that have ALL your inputs going into it. Hope you like flying Direct (-ly to the nearest airport for an emergency landing), cause that's where you're going."
Vote for which plane is the worst. Propaganda will be below the cut.
Which sucks more?
The Airbus A310
The Airbus A380
Voting ended onMay 23
Propaganda for the A310
@flavinbagel: "If '90s and '00s Honda Civics were THE cars to steal, then the OG Airbus, the A300 and A310, were THE planes to hijack. It would seem as if, like the sensible hatchback, this perfect cylinder with wings could be commandeered with little more than a screwdriver, or a particularly flat spoon handle. Moreover, these planes earned a terrible track record for accidents, hull losses, and casualties, surpassed only by the DC-10/MD-11. It's hard to say if it's the design, as its round foundation lives on as the Beluga, A330 and (by a thread) A340, or if it's just bad luck. So why single out the A310 specifically? After all, it got a more modern cockpit, and those iconic Airbus wing fences. Well yes, but the short and wide design also looks dumb. Really dumb. The A310 has the exact visual proportions of the classic 737, despite being a widebody. That's stupid. It's like the opposite of the 757-300 and I, personally, hate looking at it. Also, the early A300/10s didn't have chamfered wing boxes; the wings jut straight off the fuselage like it's starting week at the Intro to CAD class. Awful. I can't stand looking at the thing, it makes me mad. If I had a scale model of this plane as a kid I would have no sense of how big it actually is. It looks tiny but it's not. Unforgivable."
Propaganda for the A380
Anonymous: "I cannot believe how NEEDLESSLY BIG she is. The cost to operate alone is staggering, but my god she's so. She's too much. She's simply too much. What do you MEAN she can be outfitted with a whole ass functional shower?? Awful, terrible failgirl who sucks so bad."
Vote for which plane is the worst. Propaganda will be below the cut.
Which sucks more?
The 737 MAX
The Antonov An-10
Voting ended onMay 23
Propaganda for the 737 Max
@redactron: "It was a fine airplane as the -100 and -200. Even up through the -700, it was the right size for what it was. But now, with the MAX10, we can have 230(!) people stuffed in this too-long, skinny sausage, all with doors that haven't changed since the late 50's. I'll take an A321 over a MAX8 TATL any day. Everyone wants to fly classic jets but do you really want to relive being stuck in a chartered 707-320 going from Newark to Gatwick in 1980? With two less engines? Well, you can. It's the same cross section! Okay, rant over. Please don't kill me 737 MAX."
Anonymous: "it exemplifies everything wrong with boeing in the last two decades. instead of building on their history through innovation, and building a completely new airliner like originally planned, the MAX was built at the beginning of an era where cutting costs was upheld as the ultimate corporate maxim at boeing"
Propaganda for the An-10
@imperialcyane: "retired after only 15 years in service following the tragedy of Aeroflot 1491, which revealed that fatigue cracking of the wings was a serious enough issue for Aeroflot to write off nearly all of their An-10 fleet."
Vote for which plane is the worst. Propaganda will be below the cut.
Which sucks more?
The Fairchild Metroliner
The Boeing 707
Voting ended onMay 23
Propaganda for the Metroliner
@balcony-cakes: "the fairchild metroliner. i don't like it. it's too long and thin and the wings are too small. why are you like that. stop it. it looks like a fucked up bug. it really pisses me off. and its name is stupid too."
Propaganda for the 707
@nanzyn: "ugly and disproportional and worst of all responsible for homogenizing almost all modern commercial planes into the same general shape. the variety we had ... my seanoning...... all gone because of that dastardly 707. look at that. ugly. pee yellow. the body is too short for its wings and tail. ugly. ugly. yuck. no wonder no one wants her but the military." (Note that this was a separate ask) "sorry adding onto that. putting aside the Logistics (boring) can you believe we modeled modern airliners after that? That ugly as sin abomination? sure some beauties came out of it (tristar, my beloved a320) but we also got quite a few dogshits out of it too (DC10, 737 (also ugly imo)) so really was it worth it boeing? 707 👎"
Vote for which plane is the worst. Propaganda will be below the cut.
Which sucks more?
The BAC One-Eleven
The CRJ-200
Voting ended onMay 23
Note: the One-Eleven is, officially, spelled like that. They aren't numbers.
Propaganda for the One-Eleven
@flavinbagel: "epic new stall just dropped"
"In the short-haul world of the new jet age, the Caravelle looked fast (and was) and the DC-9 was, well... there. So where then does a new British airframe slot in for the very small, rear-mounted twin-engine hopper that looks like the designer left all his curves at home segment? By being extraordinarily loud, for one, but more importantly by paving the way forward in how to fall out of the sky. As BAC's test pilots would fatally discover on the 111's prototype, having the engines and tailplane sit in the shadow of the wings at a certain angle of attack allows this design to stall in just the right way that the engines flame out, the elevators lose all authority, and literally nothing can be done to stop the violent careening toward the ground, the dreaded "Deep Stall." It can be argued then, that future developments of the rear twin T-tail design, which would become ubiquitous in small jets, have the One-11 to thank for having taken this epic rake-step. The production 1-Eleven itself was, of course, modified to prevent the deep stall from happening, but a muzzled monster can still growl from the shadows, and once the 737 hit the scene with its common engines and tendency to remaining airborne, the short, sad jet's short, sad career was all but over."
Propaganda for the CRJ-200
@continuedparadox: "Absolutely dogshit landing aoa and horrendous ground clearance. Everytime I'm a passenger on one I pray that the pilot has steady hands and won't accidentally tailstrike past runway minimums
And don't get me started on all the annoying inconsistencies during start-up when you're the pilot. Special honours to the APU which only works every third attempt on a full moon above the 23rd latitude in a garden of four-leaf clovers and needs a full coterie of santa's reindeer to give it a pep talk.
Vote for which plane is the worst. Propaganda will be below the cut.
Which sucks more?
Concorde
The A300-600ST Beluga
Voting ended onMay 23
NOTE: this is the original Beluga, NOT the Beluga XL with the cute face. The Concorde is not specifically Pepsi Concorde, but you can imagine it is if it helps.
Propaganda for Concorde:
@flavinbagel (who also provided the delightful meme above): "What? It can't be!! But yes, your fave (and mine) is problematic, bestie. It's hard to ignore the elegance, the feat of ingenuity and human accomplishment, and the sheer engineering excellence of the fastest airliner to operate in commercial service. It's all too easy, then, to ignore that there were reasons why the Concorde was more commercially viable as a Lego set than as an aircraft. For one thing, it was loud when it was slow, and it was even louder when it was fast, and while being on the thing was grand, being below it (as most of us were) sucked major droop snoot. It also used 3 times more fuel per passenger than a 747 making the same transatlantic trek, while spewing soot and CO2 directly into the ozone layer. This was known for decades, but what has changed in view of more modern light is probably the prestige aspect of the supersonic airliner; flying Concorde meant being part of an elite club that proved you were in the big boy's club, where the wealthy and powerful shake hands with fistfuls of cash and a knowing nod. Hard now to believe we once viewed that with anything less than dreaded disgust, and the Concorde's legacy has soured with that shift. "It let you go to more meetings in one day!" so what? Meetings suck! Perhaps then, like the Saturn V or the Big Boy locomotive, the Concorde deserves to remain a revered marvel of engineering history, but history nonetheless."
Propaganda for the Beluga:
Anonymous: "It is called a Beluga, but unlike the current Beluga XL planes, Airbus didn't bother painting cute whale faces on them... Lame!"
Comparison of the original fuckass Beluga vs the beautiful Beluga XL:
Look the rules clearly stipulate in Chapter 4 Subsection B that I am allowed to include pure cargo carriers if I think it's funny because I'm the birthday boy
Vote for which plane is the worst. Propaganda will be below the cut.
Which sucks more?
The Airbus A340
The MD-11
Voting ended onMay 23
Propaganda for the A340
@lithominium: "too long. too thin. looks Ai Generated. Fucking Bad"
Propaganda for the MD-11
@imperialcyane: "It was an attempt to update the DC-10 that didn't meet its expected range and fuel efficiency. It also had handling issues which led to multiple accidents, and a number of other notable crashes--UPS 2976 just last year, and of course Swissair 111."
New Mentour Pilot documentary, a full 70 minutes long, covering the Helios crash! His current crew does amazing work, including often getting to the root of subjects that others miss, so if you've got an interest in aviation and haven't been keeping up with his channel it's a great one to binge.
(And since this is the LGBTQ website, I should point out that Petter employs two trans women as scriptwriters, one of whom you may know as Admiral Cloudberg, and while I don't know any timeline details, last time I read they were planning to bring back their podcast with Chloe Disaster Breakdown as a guest. So if you are a fan of planes and funny women, something to look out for)
On November 28th 1979, an Air New Zealand sightseeing flight crashed into a snowcapped volcano at the bottom of the world. The result would be 257 dead and a country divided. In the two inquiries that followed, questions would be raised about whose fault it was, and more importantly, whether there was a conspiracy to cover it up.
This is the story of the Mt. Erebus disaster, a litany of lies which I will attempt to unravel for you here.
The Mt. Erebus Disaster of 1979, explained
Antarctica is the closest Earth comes to Hell, in my opinion. A vast desert wasteland gripped by unbearable cold year round, so inhospitable that upon discovering it the Polynesians decided it wasn't worth ever going back. Mt. Erebus, a name taken from the personification of darkness in Greek mythology, is a 3,700m active volcano on Ross Island, which also houses McMurdo Station and Scott Base. Even more grim, it was not named directly after the god of darkness- it was named after the HMS Erebus, which would go on to wreck alongside the HMS terror in the infamous third Franklin expedition. Perhaps a grim omen for what would follow on the mountain that bore her name 134 years later.
Due to its inhospitable nature, Antarctica has proven a lasting problem for modern capitalism- how, exactly, do we profit off of it? Nowadays, if you want that real Titanic experience of being trapped in an open-topped lifeboat in freezing water while your ship sinks after colliding with an iceberg, you can pay a company thousands of dollars to go on an Antarctic cruise! But if you were in the groovy 70s, your best bet was to fly to Australia or New Zealand and take a sightseeing flight. Air New Zealand (formerly Tasman Empire Airways Limited or TEAL, which is why the flight number of the accident flight was actually TE901) began offering these flights in 1977, and they were a hit- and no wonder, when you hear when they were like.
The DC-10s would be deliberately underbooked to allow passengers the best view of the windows. Fancy meals and champagne would be served throughout, with the screening of Antarctic-themed movies on the way there. Once you arrived, the sights would be narrated over the PA by a real famous explorer like Sir Edmund Hillary or Peter Mulgrew. This luxurious full-day experience would cost you a total of $359 NZ. These flights were proving incredibly popular, and were scheduled year after year- though rising gas prices meant TE901 may have been the last of its kind.
Of course, these exclusive flights were popular for both passengers and crew, so Captain Jim Collins was surprised and delighted when he was selected to head the final flight of the season. Neither he or his First Officer, Greg Cassin, had flown to Antarctica before. They were briefed on the route, and according to Collins' widow and kids, he'd mediculously plotted it on an atlas the day before the flight to prepare.
The typical flight path of the Antarctic flights called for them to fly next to Beaufort Island, past Cape Bird, and down McMurdo Sound to offer passengers a beautiful view of Ross Island to their left. This makes a lot of sense for a sightseeing flight, as one can descend much lower over open ocean than land, allowing the pilots to visually navigate down the Sound at only a few thousand feet of altitude.
We need to take a detour for a moment to talk about how, exactly, planes navigate. Nowadays, we can follow made up GPS coordinates with our fancy high-accuracy computers and hundreds of sattelites, but way back in ye olden days it was a little more rudimentary. Planes would fly along imaginary routes defined by beacons. For example, a plane might fly towards a named VOR (VHF omnidirectional range) beacon, then turn to fly towards an NDB (non-directional beacon), to put them on course to land. If you're in military airspace, you might even get to tune into a TACAN (tactical air navigation) or VORTAC (VOR and also TAC) beacon. All of these are essentially just radio beacons that go "BEEP BEEP!" and tell your plane where they are, the differences don't matter. If you're an aviation professional, pretend I didn't say that.
But how do you navigate if you've got a really big distance to cover? That's where the fancy newfangled Inertial Navigation System comes in. You could enter the coordinates of your parking spot, boot the machine up, and it would track exactly where your plane is by measuring each movement you made in every direction. By programming it with the coordinates of the beacons you want to hit, the INS could make automatic corrections and fly all by itself. There's a margin of error, of course, which is why the coordinates used would be real radio beacons and not random points in space- so you could correct if your INS was getting a little off course.
On this day, the crew was dealing with some unfortunate cloud cover at around 2,000-3,000ft that was making it hard to spot Beaufort Island. US Air Traffic Controllers based at McMurdo offered a radar service that could get them down to 1,500ft, but Collins realized it wouldn't be necessary, as he spotted a large area clear of clouds. When a plane is under Instrument Flight Rules (IFR), which airliner traffic now always is, they must follow ATC instructions and use their instruments for navigation at all times. While under Visual Flight Rules (VFR), however, planes are free to amble around in clear skies while navigating with their good ol' eyes. Collins' plan was to do a couple of orbits in a figure eight pattern within this area of clear air, which would allow them to get below the cloud cover and continue on visually. While we have learned the hard way that airliners should basically never operate under VFR, in this very specific situation (over the water, in clear skies, while on a sightseeing flight, in an area with zero traffic) it was perfect.
After performing the orbits, they continued on, but since they still hadn't managed to spot any landmarks they could navigate by, they kept following the INS track. They followed it all the way into the side of the looming Mt. Erebus. A sightseers camera caught this ominous final photo at the moment of impact.
McMurdo Station's ATC informed Air New Zealand that they had lost contact with the sightseeing flight. Nervous executives waited for news that wasn't coming. At 6pm, the flight missed its stopover in Christchurch. Families waiting to pick up their loved ones at the airport were told the flight was delayed. As hypothetical fuel supplies dwindled, the worst was confirmed. At 9pm, Air New Zealand informed the nation that the plane, and the 257 people on it, were lost. Around midnight, a US Navy aircraft identified wreckage on the slope of Mt. Erebus. They confirmed there were no survivors.
The expedition to the site, which was named Operation Overdue, was undertaken the next day and lasted nearly a month. Mountain rescue workers and police were flown out to the site to work grueling 12 hour shifts sifting through wreckage, locating body parts and important pieces of wreckage, and preparing them to be shipped back to New Zealand. 44 passengers were never identified, and there were likely remains left at the site of the crash, which has since been designated a gravesite. Many of those involved in the operation suffered from post traumatic stress.
Enter the two main characters of this story. On the left, Ron Chippindale, who is not a 70s-themed male stripper, but rather was appointed the Chief Inspector of Air Accidents in charge of the Office of Air Accidents Investigations in 1975. Much maligned in retellings of this story, I have a soft spot for Chippindale, not least because he shows up in basically every New Zealand air accident case I've ever read about (and several that have nothing to do with New Zealand) and feels like kind of a recurring character. While he'd go on to have a very respectable career, he was ill prepared for this investigation just five years after becoming an investigator.
Chippindale's report would draw from a transcript of the CVR as well as the recovered data from the FDR to put together a cause. All flight systems were functioning normally, and the plane was on track, with the INS coordinates following the flight plan perfectly. He rather incredulously pointed out that the Minimum Safe Altitude (MSA) in the area was 6,000ft. According to the CVR transcript, the pilots were uncertain of their location, descending far too low, and in cloud. Clearly, this was a case of pilot error.
This did not sit well with some people- especially fellow pilots. The idea that these experienced pilots were somehow incompetent enough to fly directly into a mountain without some unknown complicating factor was confusing at best, not to mention that the CVR transcript being used to prove it was questionable. Initially, Air New Zealand pilots had been brought in to help make the transcript, as they could recognize their colleagues' voices. However, Chippindale was not happy with the amount of the transcript that couldn't be deciphered. He shipped the CVR recording off to be analyzed by separate experts, but this version of the transcript introduced massive errors, and all of the evidence of the pilots being unaware of their position was drawn from these sections. One particularly ridiculous line used in defense of this argument had one of the Flight Engineers in the back of the cockpit say "Bit thick there, eh Bert?" despite the fact that nobody on the flight deck was named Bert.
This controvercy led to a Royal Commission of Inquiry being set up, led by the gentleman on the right, Justice Peter Mahon. The longer the investigation got, the more witnesses he interviewed, and the more evidence he uncovered, the more Mahon concluded something unsettling. Air New Zealand knew exactly why the plane crashed, and they had intentionally hidden this fact from the investigators.
Here's what I didn't tell you about the sequence of events, and why the mountain seemed to quite literally come out of nowhere.
On the previous Antarctic flight, the captain was checking his position when he noticed something strange. As he flew down McMurdo Sound visually, his position relative to the McMurdo TACAN, which he expected to be relatively close, wasn't quite right. This wasn't an issue, just something to be aware of on future flights, so he sent a memo letting the ground staff know to make pilots aware that they would notice an offset at this point in the flight.
The source of this error, allegedly, was a mixup of data points. See, when the flight plan was approved by the Civil Aviation Division, it followed a track directly from Cape Hallett to the McMurdo NDB, which would take them over the top of Mt. Erebus. When entering the coordinates in the computer, however, a senior pilot "accidentally" entered a value that would bring the planes over McMurdo Sound. Allegedly. This course was, of course, a far better course to follow on a sightseeing flight, so nobody noticed the "error." This is when another "mistake" happened. The member of staff who recieved the memo from the captain on the previous flight allegedly assumed that he was being asked to change the coordinate from the McMurdo NDB to the McMurdo TACAN, a negligible distance, so he simply corrected this the night before the accident flight. Because this change was so negligible, nobody thought to bring it to the attention of the pilots, who had been briefed the day before on a route that brought them down McMurdo Sound.
In other words, the pilots believed they were over open ocean, but the flight plan had been changed at the last minute, and their autopilot was bringing them directly towards a volcano.
In addition, the altitude issue turned out to be far more complicated than Chippindale told it. While the MSA was in fact 6,000ft, the pilots had been told at the briefing that they could descend to whatever level was approved by McMurdo ATC, and these sightseeing flights regularly flew at exactly the same altitude (or even lower). Not only did other crews attest to this, but it was absolutely known by ANZ management- a personal letter to the CEO of ANZ, which described the low altitude of the plane, had been printed in a magazine funded by ANZ and distributed to every household in the country. The CEO claimed he had never read this.
But if they were in clear conditions, how did the pilots not see the mountain? This was caused by a phenomenon called whiteout, where a cloudy overcast sky and snow covered landscape can create an illusion of a flat horizon. This phenomenon was well known at the time, but the pilots had never been briefed on it, let alone provided training to identify it. In fact, US pilots based at McMurdo were dumbfounded by the lack of experience the sightseeing crews had. Among military operations, you had to have hundreds of hours of flight time in Antarctica to be a captain of a flight there, while Collins had been given command of an Antarctic flight with exactly no experience in Antarctica.
In his explosive final report, printings of which flew off the shelves in the country, Mahon accused the management of Air New Zealand of a vast cover-up. His most famous line would forever be associated with the accident: "I am forced reluctantly to say that I had to listen to an orchestrated litany of lies."
Let's get back down to Earth for a moment. We're going to stop talking about an accident, and now we'e going to talk about conspiracy.
The question of whether Mahon was right is a hard one. Certainly he was right about the altitude, right about the coordinates, right about the CVR. Was he right about a cover up? The New Zealand courts certainly thought he wasn't. While they agreed with the basic premise, they shot down this allegation, calling it a "breach of natural justice" as Mahon's mandate was to find the cause of the crash, not allege misconduct.
However, from a historical perspective we need to pick apart this question a little more, because Mahon's exhasperation at being repeatedly lied to was very well founded.
Remember that paragraph where I kept saying "allegedly?" I'm going to be real with you. Air New Zealand's explanation of how the coordinates were changed sounds like complete horseshit to me. The sheer confluence of errors needed to perfectly align are just... ridiculous. Of course, the flight plan was just coincidentally changed to fly on a much more reasonable path down the Sound, and flight crews just never noticed the "mistake!" And of course, it was just a coincidence that the flight plan was changed back right before the Civil Aviation Division was about to do a regular check through Air New Zealand's operations.
In the opinion of Mahon, and also me, all of this mistake business was covering up the rather banal crime of ANZ not bothering to resubmit their flight plan to the CAD when they realized route to the McMurdo NDB wasn't really the best idea. Nobody in their right mind would make a flight plan for a sightseeing flight go directly over an active volcano, so they moved a single coordinate a little, and the rest is history. Whether the consequent story of the last minute switch was also a lie is beyond me, and frankly, doesn't really matter.
This is where I must diverge from, and also question, the conspiratorial mindset. I'd like to introduce a new logical tool you can use to evaluate conspiracy theories that I call JFK's Razor. "Can this seeming conspiracy be explained by a series of unrelated beaurocratic fuckups and people covering their asses regarding said fuckups?"
I don't doubt that Air New Zealand's CEO was straight up lying to Mahon when he claimed he'd never read the reviews. I don't doubt that the random management pilots who had made various data entry errors had decided not to mention them to Chippindale. And I don't doubt that ANZ executives were sighing with relief when the original inquiry was rushed out by a board with barely any experience investigating large air crashes. It's whether this litany of lies was orchestrated that I doubt.
When it comes down to it, conspiracy theories don't exist to uncover the truth- they exist to make it more palatable. What's really a more disquieting reality to live in? Is it the one where a shady organization conspires to cover up a disaster they caused knowingly, or is it the one where 257 people can be left in pieces on a remote Antarctic volcano by a typo, a misunderstanding of a memo, a little change to a coordinate that surely wouldn't be noticed?
The truth that conspiracy theorists don't want to confront is that none of us, no matter how good our intentions, are immune to making a deadly mistake. Skipping safety checks, "everyone does it" breaches of protocol, little paperwork crimes that make your life easier, all of these things are consequential, whether you realize it or not. Remember those 257 people the next time your boss asks to you sign off on paperwork you didn't read or do work you weren't properly trained for. Your choices matter.
