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On that day Captain Simpson had taken the second November 1979 sightseeing flight to the Antarctic and something persuaded him to raise the matter of the southern waypoint with Captain Johnson, the Flight Manager Line Operations.
In paragraph 229 it is said that submissions had been put to the Commissioner that "the shifting of the McMurdo waypoint was done deliberately so as to conform" with a track used by military aircraft proceeding to Williams Field. Then in paragraph 230 there is a summary of contrary arguments advanced by members of the navigation section to support their claim of accident. They include
There were four further journeys in October and November 1977, four in November 1978, and three more in November 1979 on 7th, 14th and 21st. The accident flight was to be the fourteenth of the series. One or other became the southernmost waypoint, the magnetic pole destination being used at the discretion of the pilot if weather conditions made the McMurdo area unsuitable for sightseeing.
The point is referred to in paragraph 230 of the Report within a section headed "The creation of the false McMurdo waypoint and how it came to be changed without the knowledge of Captain Collins".
First Officer Rhodes made a specific inquiry at McMurdo within a few days of the disaster and ascertained that the destination waypoint of the first Air Traffic Control flight plan for 1979 had been plotted by the United States Air Traffic Control personnel, and there was evidence from the United States witnesses that this would be normal practice.
In paragraph 41 and following paragraphs there is reference to "what happened at the airline headquarters at Auckland when the occurrence of the disaster became first suspected and then known". It is explained that the navigation section became aware of the fact that when the McMurdo waypoint co-ordinates were corrected in November 1979 the movement was not one of 2.1 miles within the vicinity of Williams Field but a distance of 27 miles from longitude 164° 48' E; and that "by 30 November the occurrence of this mistake over the co-ordinates was known not only to the Flight Operations Division but also to the management of the airline.
In evidence Captain Gemmell had denied knowledge of the change that had been made to the McMurdo waypoint but the Commissioner did not accept that answer; and he is linked with the matters mentioned in paragraph 360 on the basis that he had known "about the changed co-ordinates before he went to Antarctica" and that because he
The Commissioner rejected the explanations he had heard to the effect that Captain Simpson's information seemed to point to quite a minor movement to the up-dated position of the TACAN. He stated that there appeared to have been clear advice by Captain Simpson that the "false" waypoint was 27 miles west of it.
Then in September 1978 steps were taken to print a flight plan for each Antarctic journey from a record stored in the Air New Zealand ground based planning computer. And it is at this stage that the longitude co-ordinate for the southernmost waypoint was fed into the ground computer as 164° 48' E. The Flight Track
"It was submitted that an alteration to the McMurdo waypoint to facilitate better sightseeing was not valid because flight captains had a discretion to deviate horizontally from the flight plan track." "The first question is whether the programming of the McMurdo waypoint into the 'false' position before the commencement of the 1978 flights was the result of accident or design.
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