On November 28th 1979, an Air New Zealand sightseeing flight crashed into a snowcapped volcano at the bottom of the world. The result would be 257 dead and a country divided. In the two inquiries that followed, questions would be raised about whose fault it was, and more importantly, whether there was a conspiracy to cover it up.
This is the story of the Mt. Erebus disaster, a litany of lies which I will attempt to unravel for you here.
The Mt. Erebus Disaster of 1979, explained
Antarctica is the closest Earth comes to Hell, in my opinion. A vast desert wasteland gripped by unbearable cold year round, so inhospitable that upon discovering it the Polynesians decided it wasn't worth ever going back. Mt. Erebus, a name taken from the personification of darkness in Greek mythology, is a 3,700m active volcano on Ross Island, which also houses McMurdo Station and Scott Base. Even more grim, it was not named directly after the god of darkness- it was named after the HMS Erebus, which would go on to wreck alongside the HMS terror in the infamous third Franklin expedition. Perhaps a grim omen for what would follow on the mountain that bore her name 134 years later.
Due to its inhospitable nature, Antarctica has proven a lasting problem for modern capitalism- how, exactly, do we profit off of it? Nowadays, if you want that real Titanic experience of being trapped in an open-topped lifeboat in freezing water while your ship sinks after colliding with an iceberg, you can pay a company thousands of dollars to go on an Antarctic cruise! But if you were in the groovy 70s, your best bet was to fly to Australia or New Zealand and take a sightseeing flight. Air New Zealand (formerly Tasman Empire Airways Limited or TEAL, which is why the flight number of the accident flight was actually TE901) began offering these flights in 1977, and they were a hit- and no wonder, when you hear when they were like.
The DC-10s would be deliberately underbooked to allow passengers the best view of the windows. Fancy meals and champagne would be served throughout, with the screening of Antarctic-themed movies on the way there. Once you arrived, the sights would be narrated over the PA by a real famous explorer like Sir Edmund Hillary or Peter Mulgrew. This luxurious full-day experience would cost you a total of $359 NZ. These flights were proving incredibly popular, and were scheduled year after year- though rising gas prices meant TE901 may have been the last of its kind.
Of course, these exclusive flights were popular for both passengers and crew, so Captain Jim Collins was surprised and delighted when he was selected to head the final flight of the season. Neither he or his First Officer, Greg Cassin, had flown to Antarctica before. They were briefed on the route, and according to Collins' widow and kids, he'd mediculously plotted it on an atlas the day before the flight to prepare.
The typical flight path of the Antarctic flights called for them to fly next to Beaufort Island, past Cape Bird, and down McMurdo Sound to offer passengers a beautiful view of Ross Island to their left. This makes a lot of sense for a sightseeing flight, as one can descend much lower over open ocean than land, allowing the pilots to visually navigate down the Sound at only a few thousand feet of altitude.
We need to take a detour for a moment to talk about how, exactly, planes navigate. Nowadays, we can follow made up GPS coordinates with our fancy high-accuracy computers and hundreds of sattelites, but way back in ye olden days it was a little more rudimentary. Planes would fly along imaginary routes defined by beacons. For example, a plane might fly towards a named VOR (VHF omnidirectional range) beacon, then turn to fly towards an NDB (non-directional beacon), to put them on course to land. If you're in military airspace, you might even get to tune into a TACAN (tactical air navigation) or VORTAC (VOR and also TAC) beacon. All of these are essentially just radio beacons that go "BEEP BEEP!" and tell your plane where they are, the differences don't matter. If you're an aviation professional, pretend I didn't say that.
But how do you navigate if you've got a really big distance to cover? That's where the fancy newfangled Inertial Navigation System comes in. You could enter the coordinates of your parking spot, boot the machine up, and it would track exactly where your plane is by measuring each movement you made in every direction. By programming it with the coordinates of the beacons you want to hit, the INS could make automatic corrections and fly all by itself. There's a margin of error, of course, which is why the coordinates used would be real radio beacons and not random points in space- so you could correct if your INS was getting a little off course.
On this day, the crew was dealing with some unfortunate cloud cover at around 2,000-3,000ft that was making it hard to spot Beaufort Island. US Air Traffic Controllers based at McMurdo offered a radar service that could get them down to 1,500ft, but Collins realized it wouldn't be necessary, as he spotted a large area clear of clouds. When a plane is under Instrument Flight Rules (IFR), which airliner traffic now always is, they must follow ATC instructions and use their instruments for navigation at all times. While under Visual Flight Rules (VFR), however, planes are free to amble around in clear skies while navigating with their good ol' eyes. Collins' plan was to do a couple of orbits in a figure eight pattern within this area of clear air, which would allow them to get below the cloud cover and continue on visually. While we have learned the hard way that airliners should basically never operate under VFR, in this very specific situation (over the water, in clear skies, while on a sightseeing flight, in an area with zero traffic) it was perfect.
After performing the orbits, they continued on, but since they still hadn't managed to spot any landmarks they could navigate by, they kept following the INS track. They followed it all the way into the side of the looming Mt. Erebus. A sightseers camera caught this ominous final photo at the moment of impact.
McMurdo Station's ATC informed Air New Zealand that they had lost contact with the sightseeing flight. Nervous executives waited for news that wasn't coming. At 6pm, the flight missed its stopover in Christchurch. Families waiting to pick up their loved ones at the airport were told the flight was delayed. As hypothetical fuel supplies dwindled, the worst was confirmed. At 9pm, Air New Zealand informed the nation that the plane, and the 257 people on it, were lost. Around midnight, a US Navy aircraft identified wreckage on the slope of Mt. Erebus. They confirmed there were no survivors.
The expedition to the site, which was named Operation Overdue, was undertaken the next day and lasted nearly a month. Mountain rescue workers and police were flown out to the site to work grueling 12 hour shifts sifting through wreckage, locating body parts and important pieces of wreckage, and preparing them to be shipped back to New Zealand. 44 passengers were never identified, and there were likely remains left at the site of the crash, which has since been designated a gravesite. Many of those involved in the operation suffered from post traumatic stress.
Enter the two main characters of this story. On the left, Ron Chippindale, who is not a 70s-themed male stripper, but rather was appointed the Chief Inspector of Air Accidents in charge of the Office of Air Accidents Investigations in 1975. Much maligned in retellings of this story, I have a soft spot for Chippindale, not least because he shows up in basically every New Zealand air accident case I've ever read about (and several that have nothing to do with New Zealand) and feels like kind of a recurring character. While he'd go on to have a very respectable career, he was ill prepared for this investigation just five years after becoming an investigator.
Chippindale's report would draw from a transcript of the CVR as well as the recovered data from the FDR to put together a cause. All flight systems were functioning normally, and the plane was on track, with the INS coordinates following the flight plan perfectly. He rather incredulously pointed out that the Minimum Safe Altitude (MSA) in the area was 6,000ft. According to the CVR transcript, the pilots were uncertain of their location, descending far too low, and in cloud. Clearly, this was a case of pilot error.
This did not sit well with some people- especially fellow pilots. The idea that these experienced pilots were somehow incompetent enough to fly directly into a mountain without some unknown complicating factor was confusing at best, not to mention that the CVR transcript being used to prove it was questionable. Initially, Air New Zealand pilots had been brought in to help make the transcript, as they could recognize their colleagues' voices. However, Chippindale was not happy with the amount of the transcript that couldn't be deciphered. He shipped the CVR recording off to be analyzed by separate experts, but this version of the transcript introduced massive errors, and all of the evidence of the pilots being unaware of their position was drawn from these sections. One particularly ridiculous line used in defense of this argument had one of the Flight Engineers in the back of the cockpit say "Bit thick there, eh Bert?" despite the fact that nobody on the flight deck was named Bert.
This controvercy led to a Royal Commission of Inquiry being set up, led by the gentleman on the right, Justice Peter Mahon. The longer the investigation got, the more witnesses he interviewed, and the more evidence he uncovered, the more Mahon concluded something unsettling. Air New Zealand knew exactly why the plane crashed, and they had intentionally hidden this fact from the investigators.
Here's what I didn't tell you about the sequence of events, and why the mountain seemed to quite literally come out of nowhere.
On the previous Antarctic flight, the captain was checking his position when he noticed something strange. As he flew down McMurdo Sound visually, his position relative to the McMurdo TACAN, which he expected to be relatively close, wasn't quite right. This wasn't an issue, just something to be aware of on future flights, so he sent a memo letting the ground staff know to make pilots aware that they would notice an offset at this point in the flight.
The source of this error, allegedly, was a mixup of data points. See, when the flight plan was approved by the Civil Aviation Division, it followed a track directly from Cape Hallett to the McMurdo NDB, which would take them over the top of Mt. Erebus. When entering the coordinates in the computer, however, a senior pilot "accidentally" entered a value that would bring the planes over McMurdo Sound. Allegedly. This course was, of course, a far better course to follow on a sightseeing flight, so nobody noticed the "error." This is when another "mistake" happened. The member of staff who recieved the memo from the captain on the previous flight allegedly assumed that he was being asked to change the coordinate from the McMurdo NDB to the McMurdo TACAN, a negligible distance, so he simply corrected this the night before the accident flight. Because this change was so negligible, nobody thought to bring it to the attention of the pilots, who had been briefed the day before on a route that brought them down McMurdo Sound.
In other words, the pilots believed they were over open ocean, but the flight plan had been changed at the last minute, and their autopilot was bringing them directly towards a volcano.
In addition, the altitude issue turned out to be far more complicated than Chippindale told it. While the MSA was in fact 6,000ft, the pilots had been told at the briefing that they could descend to whatever level was approved by McMurdo ATC, and these sightseeing flights regularly flew at exactly the same altitude (or even lower). Not only did other crews attest to this, but it was absolutely known by ANZ management- a personal letter to the CEO of ANZ, which described the low altitude of the plane, had been printed in a magazine funded by ANZ and distributed to every household in the country. The CEO claimed he had never read this.
But if they were in clear conditions, how did the pilots not see the mountain? This was caused by a phenomenon called whiteout, where a cloudy overcast sky and snow covered landscape can create an illusion of a flat horizon. This phenomenon was well known at the time, but the pilots had never been briefed on it, let alone provided training to identify it. In fact, US pilots based at McMurdo were dumbfounded by the lack of experience the sightseeing crews had. Among military operations, you had to have hundreds of hours of flight time in Antarctica to be a captain of a flight there, while Collins had been given command of an Antarctic flight with exactly no experience in Antarctica.
In his explosive final report, printings of which flew off the shelves in the country, Mahon accused the management of Air New Zealand of a vast cover-up. His most famous line would forever be associated with the accident: "I am forced reluctantly to say that I had to listen to an orchestrated litany of lies."
Let's get back down to Earth for a moment. We're going to stop talking about an accident, and now we'e going to talk about conspiracy.
The question of whether Mahon was right is a hard one. Certainly he was right about the altitude, right about the coordinates, right about the CVR. Was he right about a cover up? The New Zealand courts certainly thought he wasn't. While they agreed with the basic premise, they shot down this allegation, calling it a "breach of natural justice" as Mahon's mandate was to find the cause of the crash, not allege misconduct.
However, from a historical perspective we need to pick apart this question a little more, because Mahon's exhasperation at being repeatedly lied to was very well founded.
Remember that paragraph where I kept saying "allegedly?" I'm going to be real with you. Air New Zealand's explanation of how the coordinates were changed sounds like complete horseshit to me. The sheer confluence of errors needed to perfectly align are just... ridiculous. Of course, the flight plan was just coincidentally changed to fly on a much more reasonable path down the Sound, and flight crews just never noticed the "mistake!" And of course, it was just a coincidence that the flight plan was changed back right before the Civil Aviation Division was about to do a regular check through Air New Zealand's operations.
In the opinion of Mahon, and also me, all of this mistake business was covering up the rather banal crime of ANZ not bothering to resubmit their flight plan to the CAD when they realized route to the McMurdo NDB wasn't really the best idea. Nobody in their right mind would make a flight plan for a sightseeing flight go directly over an active volcano, so they moved a single coordinate a little, and the rest is history. Whether the consequent story of the last minute switch was also a lie is beyond me, and frankly, doesn't really matter.
This is where I must diverge from, and also question, the conspiratorial mindset. I'd like to introduce a new logical tool you can use to evaluate conspiracy theories that I call JFK's Razor. "Can this seeming conspiracy be explained by a series of unrelated beaurocratic fuckups and people covering their asses regarding said fuckups?"
I don't doubt that Air New Zealand's CEO was straight up lying to Mahon when he claimed he'd never read the reviews. I don't doubt that the random management pilots who had made various data entry errors had decided not to mention them to Chippindale. And I don't doubt that ANZ executives were sighing with relief when the original inquiry was rushed out by a board with barely any experience investigating large air crashes. It's whether this litany of lies was orchestrated that I doubt.
When it comes down to it, conspiracy theories don't exist to uncover the truth- they exist to make it more palatable. What's really a more disquieting reality to live in? Is it the one where a shady organization conspires to cover up a disaster they caused knowingly, or is it the one where 257 people can be left in pieces on a remote Antarctic volcano by a typo, a misunderstanding of a memo, a little change to a coordinate that surely wouldn't be noticed?
The truth that conspiracy theorists don't want to confront is that none of us, no matter how good our intentions, are immune to making a deadly mistake. Skipping safety checks, "everyone does it" breaches of protocol, little paperwork crimes that make your life easier, all of these things are consequential, whether you realize it or not. Remember those 257 people the next time your boss asks to you sign off on paperwork you didn't read or do work you weren't properly trained for. Your choices matter.
