It’s the deadliest air crash in New Zealand’s history, and one of the country’s greatest peace time disasters. At 1:49pm on 28 November 1979, Air New Zealand flight TE901 crashed into Mt Erebus on Ross Island, in Antarctica, instantly killing all 257 people on board.
Rescue teams from Antarctica and New Zealand rushed to the crash site and spent 12 days retrieving the bodies of the passengers and wreckage of the plane. The crash sparked worldwide sorrow, attention and interest. Questions were raised as to how this terrible disaster could have happened, and immediately investigations began into the cause of the tragedy.
Join us this week, as we follow the flight path of TE901 and hear the complicated and compelling details as we piece together the story of the doomed flight. On our journey we’ll search for answers and seek lessons that can be learned.
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HUMAN EXPLORATION
We humans have a fascination with the world around us, and throughout history we’ve shared an innate desire to explore it. Over millennia, human ventures have led to navigating the seas, discovering new lands, conquest of the skies and, the exploration of space.
One of the most well-known early explorers is the Venetian merchant, writer and explorer, Marco Polo. His overland adventures on the great silk road all the way to China and central Asia are legendary, because his explorations introduced whole new civilizations to the Western world.
But perhaps the most famous explorer of all time is Christopher Columbus. His credited discovery of the Americas has made him the most famous and consequential explorer of all, because his exploration of a whole new world certainly changed history.
Then, as technology increased in the 20th century, humans were able to explore parts of the earth that, for all known history, [had] remained completely inaccessible. The famous Trieste, an Italian-built submarine, made history in 1960 when it took two explorers to 11,000 meters, or nearly 7 miles below the surface of the ocean, deeper than anyone had ever gone before.
Then who could forget the 20 July 1969, when the American spaceflight, Apollo 11, first landed men on the moon. The event captured the attention of the world as no human had ever walked on the moon before.
And now space exploration is looking at earth’s closest planet, Mars. Although no human has made it to Mars yet, we have sent rovers that have done some exploring there, and there are plans for spaceflights to Mars.
ANTARCTICA BECKONS
But even with these new frontiers, people are still looking for remote and new places to explore here on earth. One of the most unpopulated and unexplored places still left on the planet is Antarctica, the icy continent at the bottom of the world. Though humans had travelled all over the world by the turn of the 20th century, Antarctica still remained the only continent not really explored.
That all changed in 1911, when the Norwegian Roald Amundsen and the Englishman Robert Falcon Scott raced to reach the South Pole first. Roald Amundsen won the race and the British explorer, Scott, perished in the endeavour.
Now, Antarctica is a vast, remote, and stunningly beautiful continent. To visit this place is said to be the trip of a lifetime, an incomparable experience, to see the wonders of the great frozen continent.
But all travel to the frozen polar lands is fraught with dangers and challenges. Antarctica is the coldest, windiest, driest, and loneliest place on planet earth. So, as you can imagine, the concept of Antarctic overflights was a new and exciting breakthrough in tourism to this place at the bottom of the world.
BIRTH OF ‘FLIGHT SEEING’
Air flights over the ice provided a quick, safe, trouble-free, and affordable way for the general public to see Antarctica.
In 1968, Air New Zealand first proposed to land a DC-8 aircraft on Williams Field at the McMurdo US Station in Antarctica. But it never happened.
Then, in the 1970s Air New Zealand began flying the long-range McDonnell Douglas DC-10 to Antarctica. It was called ‘flight seeing’ as opposed to sightseeing – a wonderful way to see the bottom of the world. Thirteen successful Air New Zealand flights had taken tourists on the popular trip to Antarctica.
The round trip would take around eleven hours and would fly over 8600 kilometers.
The 14th such flight was Air New Zealand TE901 from Auckland International Airport on 28 November 1979. The flights usually only had about 85% capacity so all passengers had the opportunity to see out the windows of the plane.
19 days before the flight, Captain Jim Collins and First Officer Cassin attended a route qualification briefing, an audio-visual briefing of the planned flight, and had also flown the route in a cockpit simulator.
The briefing covered the instrument flight rules route to the McMurdo area, which stipulated a minimum instrument meteorological conditions altitude en route of 16,000ft or 4877m.
They were also advised of a visual meteorological conditions let-down procedure which permitted them to descend to 6000ft or 1829m over McMurdo if visibility was good.
Material presented at the briefing, including printouts of a flight plan used for a previous trip, gave the impression that the route would take them down McMurdo Sound over flat sea ice.
In the early hours of 28 November, a navigational coordinate in the flight plan briefing was changed. The airline’s navigational section believed it was making a minor adjustment to the flight’s long standing destination point, but a typing error 14 months earlier meant it had actually shifted this point 27 nautical miles to the east.
Instead of the route taking Flight 901 over sea ice, as Collins and Cassin had been briefed, it would now take them directly over Mt. Erebus, a 3800 metre active volcano. The flight crew were not alerted to the change. On the morning of departure they received the adjusted flight plan and entered these coordinates into the onboard computer.
TE901 DEPARTS AUCKLAND
Flight TE901 left Auckland at 8:17am New Zealand Daylight Saving Time and headed south on its 11-hour return flight to Antarctica. On board was a flight crew of five, cabin crew of fifteen, and 237 passengers. All the flight crew were very experienced pilots, and type-rated in the DC-10. But none of the five had previously flown the Antarctic route.
The flight toward Antarctica proceeded normally. The McDonnell-Douglas was scheduled to arrive over Antarctica between 1 and 2pm. From around 1pm it had ongoing contact with both ‘Mac Centre’, the United States Navy’s air traffic control centre at McMurdo Station, and the ‘Ice Tower’ at nearby Williams Field.
Exactly five hours after takeoff, at 1:17pm Captain Collins began a descent from cruising altitude. At this point the airliner was approximately 225 kilometers or 140 miles north of McMurdo Station. At 1:45pm Cassin advised Mac Centre that the aircraft was at 1829m or 6000ft in the course of descending to 610m or 2000ft.
THE CRASH
This was the final communication from TE901. Four minutes and 42 seconds later, at 1:49pm, the aircraft crashed into the lower slopes of Mt Erebus. Both the Cockpit Voice Recorder and the Flight Data Recorder or black box recorded the pilots and engineer’s discussion leading up to the fateful moment of the crash. The crash happened so quickly that the crew had no opportunity to react, or send a radio message.
The crash site was approximately 50km, or 31 miles north of McMurdo Station, at Latitude 77˚ S. The DC-10 was totally destroyed and all 257 persons on board were instantly killed by the impact.
Meanwhile back in New Zealand, families of the victims had arrived at the international terminals at both Auckland and Christchurch airports to meet the returning passengers from ‘the flight of a lifetime.’ Some of the relatives had already heard the news, others learned of the situation as they arrived at the airport.
Information available to the relatives at the airports was limited to, “The flight is late and we have not been able to reach them on the radio since midday.” But at an Air New Zealand press conference at 10.00pm, CEO Morrie Davis officially announced that flight 901 was believed lost because, by then, it would have completely exhausted its fuel supply.
A Royal New Zealand Air Force P3-B Orion was sent from Auckland to search for the wreckage in the waters between Antarctica and New Zealand.
In addition, a United States Air Force (USAF) Starlifter captained by Major Bruce Gumble followed 901’s flight path on its return to Christchurch from McMurdo Station. Upon arrival at Christchurch the crew of the Starlifter was swarmed by the media. However, they were not bearers of good news, because there was no news of the plane.
The decision was then made to expand the search area to include the east and west of Ross Island where, later that night, they found the wreckage.
DISCOVERY OF THE WRECKAGE
It was 11.50pm when the US Commander Victor Pesces and the crew of his ski-equipped C-130 Hercules sighted a black ‘smear’ on the slopes of the snow-covered volcano Mt Erebus 16km, or 10 miles away. They moved closer and made two passes over the site.
At 1.25am NZDT on 29 November 1979, the charred wreckage was formally identified as the remains of flight TE 901 by an American helicopter, GENTLE 17, which could not land at the crash site due to poor weather and surface conditions. They radioed the position to their commanders in Antarctica, along with the recommendation to dispatch another helicopter to the crash site as soon as possible.
The crew reported: “Debris at crash site being blown by wind. No apparent survivors.” This statement confirmed the worst fears of the New Zealand public, the families of the victims, and Air New Zealand. The tragedy ultimately became New Zealand’s worst air disaster – a distinction it still holds over 40 years later.
With the wreckage located, the priority became investigation and recovery, along with the search for the two flight recorders. The first men at the crash site the next morning were New Zealand mountaineers Daryll Thompson, Hugh Logan and Keith Woodford. They were confronted by a horrific scene scattered with personal possessions and human remains.
The men established a base camp for the recovery operation: eight polar tents, sleeping bags and food for 20 people for a few days. That evening they were joined by the recovery team from New Zealand, but bad weather hampered search efforts for the next two days.
Of course, once the immediate shock and grief subsided, the inevitable question was raised, how did this happen? People wanted answers.
What really happened? How could a skilled crew, with an Antarctic explorer on the flight deck, fly straight into a mountain in clear weather? How could it possibly happen? Who was responsible?
AIR CRASH INVESTIGATIONS
Initially there were several inquiries into mechanical failures on the plane. Some thought the accident could have been the fault of the DC-10 aircraft, because during the 1970s, there had been several high-fatality and high-profile DC-10 crashes. So, when the plane went down in Antarctica, immediate suspicion was laid on the aircraft.
But these theories were quickly ruled out, and the focus switched to the flight crew, all [of whom] had never made this particular trip before.
The official accident report, released on 12 June 1980, was compiled by New Zealand’s Chief Inspector of Air Accidents and was called the Chippendale Report. It concluded that the pilots erred in flying too low and continuing to fly at a prohibited altitude when the crew was unsure of the plane’s exact position.
But then the investigators shifted their focus to the changes made to the flight plan of TE901. This became the heart of the controversy.
And so, in response to public demand, the New Zealand government announced a further one-man Royal commission of Inquiry into the accident, to be performed by Justice Peter Mahon. His report cleared the crew of blame for the disaster.
This second inquiry determined that the single, dominant, and effective cause of the crash was Air New Zealand’s alteration of the coordinates in the ground navigation computer without telling the crew or the Antarctica flight co-ordinators at the McMurdo Center.
It found that the flight plan loaded into the aircraft’s flight management computer was not that on which the flight crew had been briefed 19 days earlier, and that no one had told them of the change and evidently, they didn’t check the destination waypoint against a topographical map.
The cause of the accident was the reprogramming of the aircraft’s flight plan by the ground crew, who then failed to inform the flight crew. The new coordinates changed the flight plan to track 43km, or 27 miles east of their understanding. The coordinates programmed the plane to overfly Mount Erebus instead of down McMurdo Sound. There were also other factors that came into play and contributed to the disaster.
OTHER CONTRIBUTING FACTORS
At the time of the crash, flight TE901 was flying in local whiteout conditions, that is in clear air under cloud cover, but with no ground surface definition. Outside, a layer of clouds blended with the white snow-covered volcano, forming a sector whiteout – that is, no contrast between ground and sky was visible to the pilots.
The effect deceived everyone on the flight deck, making them believe that the white mountainside was the Ross Ice Shelf, which was in fact now behind the mountain. The flight recorder showed that the flight crew was confident of their position and that they were following the correct flight path until the collision alarms sounded just before the crash.
Despite most of the crew being engaged in identifying visual landmarks at the time, it appears that they never perceived that there was a mountain directly in front of them. And so, at 1:49 pm, Air New Zealand Flight 901 crashed into Mt Erebus at a height of 460 meters.
In other words, the pilots thought they were flying over McMurdo Sound when, in fact, they were flying at an altitude that might have been safe if they were flying over water, but they weren’t. They were on the wrong flightpath, one which took them directly into the mountain.
In 1979, the TE901 crash into Mount Erebus was the fourth largest air disaster in world history. A total of 257 deaths, with people from New Zealand, Japan, the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, France and Switzerland on board. The tragedy shocked the nation and the world.
There is still controversy and some unanswered questions regarding the cause of the crash of Air New Zealand TE 901. The debate over whether pilot error or Air New Zealand was to blame for the Erebus disaster continues today. And the sad reality is, we may never know the full details and exact cause of the crash, and we may never get all the answers. But blame isn’t the point here.
WRONG PATHs
Instead, the one thing we do know for sure is that the flight was not clear about where it was, and where it was going. The pilots thought they were in one place when, in fact, they were in another. Their coordinates were wrong. In the simplest of terms, they were on the wrong path. And, in this case, the wrong path led to devastating consequences.
Yes, wrong paths can, at times, have tragic consequences. And that’s true for life as well. We are all on our own path, on our own journey of life. We’re trying to find our way, the right way, through this journey of life. We’re all seeking to find happiness in our relationships, fulfilment in our workplace, meaning and purpose in life. And we’re looking for the right way, the best path to find them.
Sometimes we realise that we’re on the wrong path, and we desperately need a reset. We need to recalibrate and get our lives back on the right track. Fortunately, when we do lose our bearings, God has given us a compass to guide our path and set us in the right direction.
BACK ON TRACK
That compass is the Bible, God’s Holy Word. The truth that we find in the Bible never changes. It’s constant and reliable. It will always point us in the right direction. Jesus says in John 17:17,
“Sanctify them by the truth; your word is truth”
Now, what does sanctify mean? Well, it simply means to grow up and to be made more like Christ – to get a reset. After you choose to follow Jesus, you’re not the same person. You’re different. You’re being sanctified.
And how are you sanctified? By God’s truth. The more you incorporate God’s Word into your life, the more you’re going to be transformed and made new. With the help of God’s presence, the Holy Spirit, you’ll be able to reset the areas of your life where you want to experience change.
Making a positive change will always require you to know God’s Word. It’s the manual for resetting your life! When you decide that you don’t like the way you’re living and the decisions you’ve made are just not working, then you need to go to God’s Word.
It’s going to help you in very practical ways. Here’s what it says:
“All Scripture is inspired by God and is useful to teach us what is true and to make us realize what is wrong in our lives. It corrects us when we are wrong and teaches us to do what is right. God uses it to prepare and equip his people to do every good work” (2 Timothy 3:16-17)
The Bible shows you the path to walk on. It helps you reset. It shows you where you got off the path. It shows you how to get back on the path. And it shows you how to stay on the path.
In his Word, God has given you everything you need to make changes and then stay on the right path. This is why a daily quiet time of Bible study and prayer is so important. If you’re going to change, then you’ve got to face the truth. And where is the truth? It’s in God’s Word. When you’re not in God’s Word, you’re not learning and facing the truth on a daily basis.
The Bible is a mirror that will reflect the good, the bad, and those areas that need change. Let God show you all the truth he offers in his Word so you can reset and make changes that will lead to a life of purpose and joy.
Many of us are standing at a crossroads right now. We’re deciding which way to go. We’re looking for a safe flight path for our journey of life. We want to make sure we’ve set our coordinates correctly. Remember, God’s compass, the Bible, is a gift to guide our path.
Trusting this compass provides assurance, peace, and hope. It’s something we can depend on as we navigate life. God shows us in His Word what the right path is and how to stay on it. And He gives us the power and ability to follow that path.
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If you’ve appreciated our journey from New Zealand to Antarctica as we’ve followed the flight path of the ill-fated Flight TE901 and our reflections on the importance of setting the right coordinates for our journey through life, then be sure to join us again next week when we will share another of life’s journeys together. Until then, let’s pray to the one and only true God who has given us the Bible as a compass to guide us through life.
Father, today we’ve recounted the tragic flight of TE901 and we pray for your blessing and comfort on all those associated with the tragedy. We’ve also been reminded of just how consequential it can be if we think we’re on the right path when, in fact, it turns out that we are on the wrong one instead. Lord, we thank you for the gift of your Word, the Bible, that shows us what the right path is for our journey of life, and how to stay on it. May we all ensure that we daily meditate on God’s Word and spend time in prayer. Please bless us now we pray, and we ask these things in Jesus’ name, Amen.
