![]() And reaching out to Antarctica, about 4,500km to the south, fitted perfectly into that story. Technological advances were a big part of that new path, infrastructure was key to the national story of settling, conquering and gaining control over the land. In the 1960s and 70s the old narrative of being a progressive outpost of the British Empire had fallen to pieces or was just not making sense anymore, he says.īut the country was trying to find its feet. It came at a time the relatively young nation was in a crucial period of finding a new narrative for its identity, explains Rowan Light, a historian with Canterbury University. As people said at the time, almost everyone was somehow connected to the Erebus disaster, whether through knowing a victim, a member of the many heroic recovery operations, or taking sides in the lengthy legal battle that ensued.Īnd the tragedy left New Zealand in shock. New Zealand's population was then only around three million people. Forty-four people were never identified during the search and recovery operations. The crash killed 227 passengers and 30 crew. The pilot trusted the automatic flight path, assuming the white he was seeing through the cockpit window was simply the ice and snow on the water below, not the face of a mountain. The whiteout meant the light between the white snow or ice underneath and the clouds overhead created an illusion of clear visibility. The second cause was a weather phenomenon known as whiteout - and that's what is likely to have sealed the plane's fate. The team thought their route was the same as previous flights, going over ice and water in the McMurdo Sound, when in fact the path was going over Ross Island - and the 3,794m volcano Mt Erebus. The pilots had been briefed with a flight path which was different from the one put into the plane's computer. Two main reasons have been determined as the cause of the crash. You've got a satellite based navigation system, so being on the wrong flight path like that would just not be possible. In part, that's because of lessons learned from crashes like the one of TE901. That same accident would not happen on a modern airliner, Captain Andrew Ridling, head of the New Zealand Air Line Pilots Association, told the BBC. Search and rescue operations were dispatched and soon confirmed the worst fears: wreckage was spotted on Ross Island, on the lower slopes of Mt Erebus and it was clear there had been no survivors. Wherever it was, it was no longer in the air. With no time to pull up, six seconds later the plane ploughed straight into the side of Mt Erebus.Īfter hours of waiting and confusion, the assumption back in New Zealand was that the plane must have run out of fuel. Shortly before 1pm, the plane's proximity alarms went off. Many of these photos were later found in the wreckage and could still be developed, some of them taken seconds before the crash.īut instead of ice and snow in the distance, what the cockpit was looking at was the mountain right ahead of them. On board the DC 10, people were busy taking photographs or filming in the cabin and out of the windows. Assuming he was on the same flight path as previous flights and over the vast McMurdo Sound, he wouldn't have foreseen any problems. What better way to spend a day than to cruise on an 11-hour non-stop round trip from Auckland down the length of the country and on to the great southern continent? The flights offered first class luxury and a stunning view over the endless ice at the edge of the world.īut on that day in 1979, things would go very wrong.Īt around noon, the pilot Capt Jim Collins flew two large loops through the clouds to bring the plane down to about 2,000ft (610m) and offer his passengers a better view. And the legacy of the Mt Erebus disaster is still felt 40 years on.Īir New Zealand had started operating scenic flights over Antarctica only two years before, and they had been a great success. The tragedy of flight TE901 was a shock for New Zealand, affecting almost everyone in the country in some way, and led to years of investigations and a bitter blame game. On 28 November 1979, a sightseeing aircraft carrying 257 people crashed head-on into the side of a volcano in Antarctica. ![]() It remains New Zealand's worst peacetime disaster. With no time to pull up, six seconds later the plane ploughed straight into the side of Mt Erebus.
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