Fascinating Horror - On the 28th of November, 1979, Air New Zealand Flight 901 took off for a sightseeing tour of the Antarctic with 237 passengers and 20 crew on board.
Not a single one of them would ever return.
One small and seemingly insignificant error, made more than a year before, had already started a chain of events that would set the flight, quite literally, on the path to disaster.
Background
In February 1977, Air New Zealand and Quantas began offering sightseeing flights to Antarctica.
These flights were incredibly popular – and understandably so.
Passengers would experience unique views of a wild and mysterious part of the world – one that relatively few had ever seen.
As Air New Zealand put it: “The flights will give YOU a unique opportunity to look down on the lonely land of Scott, Shackleton and Byrd, and their explorer scientist successors…” Antarctica is a vast but sparsely populated continent.
It’s only human inhabitants are researchers, whose numbers peak at around 5,000 in the summer.
Conditions there are harsh all year round.
The lowest ever recorded temperature on Earth (−89.2 degrees Celsius or −128.6 degrees Fahrenheit) was recorded there.
As well as being the coldest continent, it is also the driest and windiest.
With these new flights tourists would be able to take a view of this dangerous continent in complete comfort and safety, with meals and refreshments served throughout and a complimentary bar service.
Even the in-flight movies were Antarctic themed, and an expert would be on board to provide live commentary over the course of a flight lasting 10 to 12 hours.
All of this cost just NZ$275.
When asked for feedback, most passengers said that they saw the trip as a once-in-a-lifetime experience, and said that it was the sense of adventure and exploration that attracted them to it.
People would travel to New Zealand from all over the world specifically for an Antarctic sightseeing flight. Lots of people.
Over the years they were running, around 10,000 passengers visited the Antarctic on board one of these flights.
237 people had booked tickets for the flight on the 28th of November, 1979.
This was around 15% under full capacity, which was normal for sightseeing flights like these.
Some seats were left empty so that passengers could move around the plane to get the best views.
Scheduled to fly were Captain Jim Collins and co-pilot Greg Cassin.
Both were experienced pilots but had never flown to Antarctica before.
They had, however, attended a route qualification briefing.
This briefing included a 45-minute flight simulation and printouts of the intended route, which was to take them south from Auckland to Cape Hallett in Antarctica before continuing along the coast to the Ross Sea.
They would then fly down McMurdo Sound, a body of water to the west of Ross Island where Mount Erebus, an active volcano, stood at a height of 3,794 metres (or 12,448 feet).
Over the vast expanse of McMurdo Sound, they would perform two large loops through the clouds to bring the plane down to a lower altitude and offer passengers a better view.
After this, they would head back north to Christchurch, where they would stop for 45 minutes for refuelling and a crew change before completing the journey back to Auckland.
The Mount Erebus Disaster
At 8:30am, passengers and crew boarded the McDonnell-Douglas DC-10 for Flight TE901.
The first four hours of the flight passed without incident.
Around noon, local time, there were regular back-and-forth communications between the crew and both McMurdo Station and the tower at the nearby Williams Field.
At 12:49, however, these communications abruptly ceased, and Flight 901 could not be reached again.
By 2:00pm, just over an hour after the last communication with the DC-10, the US Navy released a situation report saying that they were sending out three aircraft in an attempt to locate the missing plane.
Flight 901 had been scheduled to land in Christchurch at 6:05pm that evening.
Family members that were waiting for their loved ones were initially told that the flight was merely delayed, and that this was perfectly normal.
The longer the wait went on, however, the clearer it became that something was wrong.
At 9:00pm, around 30 minutes after the plane would have run out of fuel, Air New Zealand issued a statement to the press that the plane was lost.
It wasn’t until shortly after midnight that a US search team spotted some debris on the side of Mount Erebus.
At 9:00am the following morning helicopters were able to take search parties to the mountain where they confirmed that the wreckage was all that remained of Flight 901.
It became quickly apparent that there were no survivors.
It appeared that the plane had crashed directly into Mount Erebus and exploded, scattering debris across the mountainside.
Amongst that debris were hundreds of human bodies – people who had to be recovered and positively identified.
The logistics of doing so were complicated.
Recovery workers camped on the mountainside a short distance from the crash site, and worked in 12 hour shifts in the perpetual Antarctic daylight.
They were faced with scavenging birds, freezing conditions, scarce resources and constant exposure to the sight of traumatic injuries.
Despite all these factors they worked heroically to recover as many bodies and body parts as possible, and were ultimately able to positively identify all but 44 of the victims.
The Aftermath
In the aftermath of the crash, an inquiry was launched.
After some investigation, the New Zealand Chief Inspector of Air Accidents, Ron Chippindale, ruled that the crash had been due to pilot error.
He blamed the decision to descend below the cloud when the crew were, according to him, unsure of the plane’s exact position.
This was a manoeuvre that, he reported, certainly was not approved by the airline, and which the pilots had been wrong to carry out.
This assertion, however, was undermined by the fact that there was an abundance of publically available evidence of previous flights on the route being cleared to descend to similar low altitudes.
This evidence included articles in Air New Zealand’s own travel magazine, and in another magazine distributed to homes across the country courtesy of Air New Zealand.
Data recorded on previous flights also indicated that descending to these low altitudes was practically routine.
Following a public outcry, a second inquiry was authorised by the government of New Zealand – this time headed by Justice Peter Mahon.
When Mahon released his report in 1981, it told a rather different story.
Mahon noted that, 14 months before the flight, route data had been computerised.
While it was being computerised, a transcription error had been made – a co-ordinate was entered as having a longitude of 164 degrees rather than 166.
This small error put flights on a route down McMurdo Sound, rather than overflying Mount Erebus as they were supposed to.
Since flying over open water seemed a more safe and sensible route than overflying an active volcano, pilots did not question it, and more than a dozen flights incorrectly flew down McMurdo Sound.
A pilot on a sightseeing flight on the 14th of November noticed this discrepancy, and reported it to an officer.
At this point a misunderstanding occurred.
The officer attempted to make a correction to the computerised flight path, thinking in doing so that he was only making a small adjustment, changing a waypoint from the location of a non-directional beacon to the location of an airfield just a short distance away.
If, indeed, he had been making this change, it would not have materially affected the flight.
This was, however, not the correction he was actually making.
Rather than moving a waypoint an insignificant distance, he instead shifted it (and consequently the path of the flight) 43.5 kilometres (or 27 miles) to the east.
The crew who were due to fly the next day were not told of the alteration.
The new route matched the original flight plan from 1977 and directly overflew Mount Erebus.
However, the crew had been briefed on the McMurdo Sound route, and – having not been told otherwise – firmly believed that this was the route they would be flying.
Should the pilots not have noticed that they weren’t over McMurdo Sound ? A combination of factors meant that they could not possibly have done so.
As well as it being the first time they had flown the route, the pilots were also affected by whiteout.
This is a phenomenon whereby a cloudy white sky becomes indistinguishable from a white snow-covered landscape.
Though visibility was perfectly clear, they could not distinguish the mountain as it loomed up in front of them.
The Mahon inquiry cleared the crew of any wrongdoing.
What’s more, it asserted that airline executives and senior pilots at Air New Zealand had engaged in a conspiracy to cover up any wrongdoing, and accused them of “an orchestrated litany of lies".
Air New Zealand were ordered to pay more than half of the costs of the inquiry, but this ruling was successfully appealed at the High Court of New Zealand.
30 years would pass before Air New Zealand issued an apology, and when they did so it was only for their actions in the aftermath of the accident, not for the accident itself.
In 2019, 40 years after the crash, they went on to issue a full apology.
A funeral was held in February 1980 to bury the unidentified remains recovered from the crash site.
At that time, the friends and families of the dead did not know just how long they would have to wait before the truth would emerge about the loss of their loved ones.
Over the course of the many decades between the crash and the ultimate acceptance of responsibility, the wreckage of Flight 901 has remained on the side of Mount Erebus, buried by snow, a quiet marker of the place where 257 people lost their lives.
SOURCES:
- "Mount Erebus disaster: The plane crash that changed New Zealand" by Andreas Illmer, published by BBC News, November 2019. Link: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-50555046
- "Erebus Disaster" by The Ministry for Culture and Heritage, published by nzhistory.govt.nz, November 2021. Link: https://nzhistory.govt.nz/culture/erebus-disaster
- "Erebus: The Loss of TE901" by the New Zealand Air Line Pilots' Association, 2022. Link: https://www.erebus.co.nz/
- "'The time has come': Ardern apologises for New Zealand's worst air disaster" by Eleanor Ainge Roy, published by The Guardian, November 2019. Link: 'The time has come': Ardern apologises for New Zealand's worst air disaster
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