Special Hearings — Helderberg Flight Special Hearing — 1998-06-01

MARGO: I do not want to encourage you into an objection which you do not want to make, but we will notice that you will take the point that confidential portions of the conversation should not be played in public."
 Now, with the greatest of respect, that is bizarre.   There is nothing on the first part of the tape to give offence to anybody, there is no objection from IFAPA, and yet Margo goes out of his way to make certain that the first 28 minutes of the tape are not played to the commission, and I would respectively submit to you that the reason is quite clear, on that first 28 minutes is the discussion of dinner.  Once you accept that the discussion of dinner is on the tape, you must ask yourself the following questions:  it becomes trite logic that that tape recording was made shortly after take-off and not before the descent into Mauritius.   Now why is that important?   Airline pilots who reach the standard of flying 747's around the world do so because they have been trained to an extraordinarily high level.   I use the word "trained" advisedly.   You train an animal, a human, to behave in a certain way without thinking, you train troops to obey without question, and the airline pilots are not experimental people, they don't try out new things in the air, they follow tried and tested means of dealing with everything.   So that if there was a fire or an emergency or a blocked toilet, there is a way of dealing with it, which has been dealt with before, and that way is to take open or to find out what the cockpit operating manual says and to follow those instructions implicitly, and the cockpit instructions for a fire are quite - if there is a fire on board, you are expected as a pilot to make every effort to put it out.   Having put out the fire, you are expected to land immediately at the nearest suitable airfield.   And the reasons are not hard to fathom.   A fire may have done considerable damage structurally to the aircraft, and that aircraft may not be fit to fly on, and therefore your primary duty to the aircraft, to its carriers and to the passengers, is to get to a point of safety as fast as possible after a fire.   
 If the fire occurred outside Taipei, as was strongly suggested by the cockpit voice recorder, then we must ask why it is that Captain Dawie Uys did not land that aircraft as quickly as he could after he'd got the fire out, presuming of course that he got the fire out?   
 It is likely that they dealt with the fire, because it is extremely unlikely that an aircraft flew for seven hours with an active fire aboard, only to be destroyed outside Mauritius.
 It is also extremely likely that, having dealt with the fire, Uys would have notified the parties who knew about these things at ZUR.   It is very likely that he would have told them that he had a fire.   It is very likely that he would have explained to them that he was taking the aircraft down to see that there was no structural damage, or damage to the controls of the aircraft.   And yet he didn't do that, he flew on.
 Now, why is it that a pilot of Captain Uys' experience would have flown on after a fire?   And I have now accepted that a fire did occur within two to two and a half hours of Taipei.   The answer to my question lies in South African Airways' position in the world in 1988, and in South African Airways' position at the time.   It is not difficult to remember back that in 1988 we were deep into the reign of P W Botha and that South Africa had never made it past the Rubicon and that we were still the pariahs of the world.  South African Airways had limited rights to fly the inter-national airways and we as a nation were justifiably despised throughout the civilised world.   If Uys had landed his aircraft, the only suitable airfields on that leg of the flight would have belonged to nations who were politically hostile to South Africa at the time, and if Uys had landed an intact aircraft at Bombay or anyone of a number of airfields, the first thing that would have happened was that a ground engineer would have examined that aircraft and an investigation into the nature of the fire and the contents of the hold would have been top priority.   If Uys didn't land, despite the regulations requesting him to land, and despite the dire need to land, there must have been overwhelmingly important considerations, and possibly even instructions when prevented this from happening.   We know that that would have been typically something which would have been discussed on ZUR, and yet the tape of that day, after the take-off, the new tape, has inexplicably gone missing.   The tape of the next day was there, the tape of the take-off was there, and only the tape of that crucial period in between those two tapes has gone missing.
 Now, let us look what Margo did to investigate that, and the answer is a stunning nothing.   He mentions that he would like to ask questions of somebody who could allow this to happen, he never does.   He truncates the cross-examination of Mr Vernon Nadel, who was the man operating that tape, just as the cross-examination was starting to bear fruit, and most inexplicable of all, the very next witness, Captain Jimmy...
TAPE TURNS OVER - WORDS LOST
...is that so important, and if you put a reference mark there, I will revert to it in due course.
 Margo's finding at the end of the Margo Inquiry was that the tape had inexplicably been misplaced or it had been overtaped.   With great respect, this doesn't bear even the most casual scrutiny.   If the tape had been overtaped, it would have been a matter of great simplicity for an official of South African Airways to bring the overtaped physical evidence of the tape to Margo and say to him, "Judge, there is the tape, for some reason it got out of sequence and we overtaped it".   That was never done.   So we must presume that that is not what happened to the tape.
 If the tape went missing, it was a matter commonly explored by lawyers in the adversarial system of our courts to cross-examine all the parties involved with the custody of that tape and to retrace the steps of that path of that tape towards its eventual disappearance.   That was never done.  And the fact that Jimmy Deale was never questioned is inexplicable in the light of a conversation that I had with him during the inquest or the press council hearing into the Star newspaper which was conducted after a complaint by Armscor into certain newspaper articles which appeared in the popular press.   My role in that investigation was to investigate as much as possible about the Helderberg and during that investigation, late one evening I tracked Jimmy Deale down to his home in Durban, I phoned him up and I tape recorded the subsequent conversation, which went along the lines of, "Captain Deale, my name is Dr Klatzow, I'm investigating the Helderberg, I know you signed out the tape and the log book from ZUR that night, what did you do with it?", and his answer, after some prevarication, was that he had signed it out and that he had handed it to none other than Captain Mickey Mitchell, who was in the presence of the chief executive officer of the airline, one Gert van der Veer, and the legal representatives of the airline, one Advocate Malherbe.   I phoned Captain Mickey Mitchell, who was in charge of ZUR that night, and again, amidst stunning prevarication, he finally agreed that he had received the tape and that he would have passed it on to somebody senior.  Now why was that never explored by Judge Margo?

CHAIRPERSON: Now was this Mr Mitchell of recent origin?

DAVID JOSEPH KLATZOW: Sorry?

CHAIRPERSON: Was this engagement with Mr Mitchell, where you were coaxing him to, you know, to come out with what had happened to the tape, was this fairly recently?

DAVID JOSEPH KLATZOW: Four years ago.