known."

On the face of it the unqualified idea expressed in that sentence is
that Mr. Davis had decided to suppress from everybody outside the
airline all information about the changed flight track. But if that
meaning were intended it has been greatly modified in paragraph 48.
There it is said--

"It was inevitable that these facts would become known. Perhaps the
chief executive had only decided to prevent adverse publicity in
the meantime, knowing that the mistake over the co-ordinates must
in the end be discovered."

Of course if the decision were merely "to prevent adverse publicity in
the meantime" then such an attitude could not in any way be consistent
with an attempt "orchestrated" by Mr. Davis to hid from official
scrutiny what finally was held by the Commissioner in paragraph 393 to
be "the single dominant and effective cause of the disaster". Despite
that, paragraph 48 goes on to say this:

"This silence over the changing of the co-ordinates and the failure
to tell the air crew was a strategy which succeeded to a very
considerable degree. The chief inspector discovered these facts
after he had returned from Antarctica on or about 11 December
1979. In his report, which was published in June 1980, the chief
inspector referred to what he termed the 'error' in the McMurdo
destination point, and the fact that it had been corrected a matter
of hours before the flight left Auckland."

It is difficult to understand why the Commissioner considered "this