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.
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.
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.
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.