on my part that Captain Gemmell recovered documents from Antarctica
which were relevant to the fatal flight, and which he did not
account for to the proper authorities."

At the conclusion of this section of the Report the Commissioner said
that he could "quite understand the difficulty in recovering loose
documents from this desolate mountain side, although the heavy atlas",
he said, "was not in this category". But he stated that an opportunity
had been "created for people in the airline to get rid of documents
which might seem to implicate airline officials as being responsible for
the disaster". And he spoke of all these matters in terms of
"justifiable suspicion".

The condition of Captain Collins' flight bag when it was first seen by
Mr Woodford had already been mentioned. His letter dated 5th December
1980 was written immediately after some cross-examination of Captain
Gemmell had been given widespread publicity and on Monday 8th December
1980 Captain Gemmell was still giving evidence. By then he was under
cross-examination by counsel assisting the Commission and the latter
proceeded to read into the record the text of the letter (Exhibit 266)
which reads:

"Dear Sir,

At the time of the DC10 crash I was employed in Antarctica by
D.S.I.R. as a survival instructor/mountaineer assistant. I was one
of the three mountaineers who made the initial inspection of the
site for survivors. I was also one of the three mountaineers who
accompanied Messrs David Graham (Investigator) Ian Gemmell & Ian
Wood (Air NZ) during their initial inspection of the aircraft.