The airline took the case to an appeals court and won, with Mr Mahon's allegation they intentionally had obscured the crash causes overturned. The Mt Erebus crash was the third in that list and by far the deadliest. While the investigation had also uncovered the mismatch in the flight paths, it nonetheless concluded that a higher altitude would have saved the plane from crashing. And reaching out to Antarctica, about 4,500km (2,780 miles) to the south, fitted perfectly into that story.Yet a row of terrible disasters was to profoundly shake that sense of self. But instead of ice and snow in the distance, what the cockpit was looking at was the mountain right ahead of them.
"While words will never bring back those lost on Mt Erebus this day 40 years ago, I would like to express regret on behalf of Air New Zealand for the accident which took the lives of 257 passengers and crew. On the morning of 28 November 1979, Air New Zealand Flight TE901 left Māngere airport, Auckland, for an 11-hour return Search and rescue aircraft in Antarctica were activated and at midnight (NZST) wreckage was sighted on the lower slopes of Mt Erebus. Famously, the head of the inquiry, judge Peter Mahon, described the airline's defence as "an orchestrated litany of lies" - a phrase which would stick in the national consciousness. "Forty years on, the crash remains a story crucial to New Zealand's recent history. Despite this, there is as yet no national memorial to the victims. "Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern also used the day to give a first full apology by a New Zealand government. But the country was trying to find its feet. Again, the Erebus tragedy was in limbo, and the blame game grotesquely overshadowed the relatives' grief.
Assuming he was on the same flight path as previous flights and over the vast McMurdo Sound, he wouldn't have foreseen any problems.On board the DC 10, people were busy taking photographs or filming in the cabin and out of the windows. Erebus | Air New Zealand Flight 901 - YouTube They had flown well below the minimum safe altitude set by the airline and it seemed easy to say that sticking to that minimum would have prevented the crash. Forty-four people were never identified during the search and recovery operations. Even a promotional brochure for the scenic route had boasted of the scenery using photographs clearly taken from a way below the safe altitude.The Royal Commission did not only find that the airline was to blame due to the mistakes in the flight path, but it also alleged that Air New Zealand had essentially tried to cover up its own responsibility: a conspiracy to blame the pilots leaving Air New Zealand morally in the clear - and also in terms of compensation payouts to the victims' relatives. Wherever it was, it was no longer in the air.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 "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. In part, that's because of lessons learned from crashes like the one of TE901. 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. Searching for the wreckage On November 28 1979, due to the plane losing communications for several hours and of course not arriving at it's destination, the officials at Air New Zealand grew concerned about the … "So you had this really interesting moment with those disasters because they really called into question that narrative of technological progress and control," Mr Light explains. "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. "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 any more," he says. [1] [2] Scheduled Air New Zealand Antarctic sightseeing flight had been operating between 1977 and 1979.
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. Air New Zealand had started operating scenic flights over Antarctica only two years before, and they had been a great success. Air New Zealand had been an object of pride and prestige The TE901 crash was also a serious blow to Air New Zealand's reputation. A cross and a koru - a stone coiled fern - have been placed near the crash site and Ross Island has been witness to several commemoration events by the victims' relatives, but the debate of what form a memorial should take and where it would go has generated its own frustrations. That legal battle came swiftly and was a second blow after the crash itself. Wreckage from the plane is still at the mountain But over the years, the overwhelming consensus became that the airline had indeed been at fault and not the pilot team. The whiteout meant the light between the white snow or ice underneath and the clouds overhead created an illusion of clear visibility. At 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. The results couldn't have been more different: this time, the blame landed squarely on Air New Zealand.