consideration by the Royal Commission so that the proceedings were
unnecessarily prolonged. Concerning the matter the Commissioner said
this in the Appendix to the Report dealing with the awards of costs,
which must be mentioned later:

"In an inquiry of this kind, an airline can either place all its
cards on the table at the outset, or it can adopt an adversary
stance. In the present case, the latter course was decided upon.
The management of the airline instructed its counsel to deny every
allegation of fault, and to counter-attack by ascribing total
culpability to the air crew, against whom there were alleged no
less than 13 separate varieties of pilot error. All those
allegations, in my opinion, were without foundation".

The general complaint that Air New Zealand had adopted an adversary
approach and withheld evidence until a late stage needs to be assessed
against the control exercised by counsel assisting the Commission
concerning the order in which witnesses were to be called and the way in
which the Inquiry progressed. Before the initial hearing to settle
questions of procedure he supplied the airline with a "Memorandum as to
areas to be covered by Air New Zealand evidence". It is dated 13th June
1980 and specifies 21 topics. Then on 19th June he circulated a
"Memorandum to counsel engaged in the DC10 Inquiry" advising that the
parties were to prepare initial briefs which he would then put in
sequence. And at the preliminary hearing on 23rd June it was arranged
that a basically chronological order should be followed after Mr
Chippindale had been called as the first witness. On the following day
counsel for the Civil Aviation Division took issue with the requirement
that its brief of evidence should be handed in before Mr Chippindale had
appeared and the Commissioner ruled that briefs of evidence would be