EREBUS BODIES UPDATE

One of the reasons that no one saw this as an error was that it seemed a logical change to make shifting the route away from an active volcano and down over the flat sea ice of McMurdo Sound actually produced a better, safer result. The effect of this erroneous keystroke was to shift the route nearly 30 miles (48 kilometres) to the west, so that it ran down McMurdo Sound. At this time, an error was made the data entry operator keyed a 4 instead of a 6 into the machine, and this error had never been noticed as such. Then, some 18 months after Antarctic flights began, 14 months prior to the accident, the airline computerized its method of storing and producing flight plans. The DC-10 was flown by the experienced pilots Jim Collins and Greg Cassin. The data entry operator keyed a 4 instead of a 6 into the machineĪccording to a website dedicated to the disaster and the investigation into the crash, the original flight plan was over Mount Erebus but trips “were able to operate away from the planned nav track in brilliant weather conditions ensuring good surface and horizon definition. According to the same report from 1984, the flight plan given the morning of the Mount Erebus crash included the path directly over the mountain’s peak the flight was below 13,000 feet (3962 metres) in altitude. The flight crew was never notified of this change.

EREBUS BODIES UPDATE

14, 1979, Simpson was surprised by the disparity and mentioned the difference to Air New Zealand’s Navigation department, which triggered an update to the flight plan reinforcing the McMurdo coordinates with the navigational beacon. When the coordinates were compared by Captain Leslie Simpson, who piloted a similar flight from New Zealand to Antarctica on Nov. This was the path used previously by other pilots and crew when embarking on the sightseeing trips no one was consciously aware that the flight plan and the ground control system printout were divergent, according to a report on the crash published in 1984. The red line shows where they were and, ultimately, where the crash occurred.

The flight plan depicted here in grey shows where the pilots of Flight 901 believed they were flying. 9, taken from Air New Zealand’s ground control system, instructed then to fly a more southerly route down the middle of McMurdo Sound, putting Mount Erebus about 27 miles (43.5 kilometres) to the east of the flight. The printout given to Collins and Cassin on Nov. Image: īut here’s where things get a little odd: The flight plan as approved and as received by pilots during the few years of the sightseeing flights’ history had the pilots instructed to take the plane almost directly above the summit of Mount Erebus, a 12,448-foot (3794-metre) peak. Air New Zealand Sightseeing Flight 901 at Mount Erebus. It was a detailed flight plan that consisted of flying directly from Cape Hallett to the McMurdo beacon on Antarctica. They received their first copy of the flight’s itinerary on November 9, a plan that had been established and approved by the New Zealand Department of Transport Civil Aviation Division in 1977. Pilots Jim Collins and Greg Cassin were experienced but had not flown into Antarctica before that trip. But at first, it only deepened the mystery-the wrecks were in the wrong place.There might be questions about what did and did not happen to Air New Zealand Flight TE901 on November 29, 1979, but one thing is abundantly clear: The crash was 100% avoidable. The immediate and ongoing hope was that the discovery of the wrecks would fill in the missing pieces and shine a light on what happened to the Franklin Expedition. And three years after that, the wreck sites’ first-ever visitors, passengers from the Adventure Canada-chartered ship Ocean Endeavour, watched as archeologists probed the Erebus for secrets. Two years later, another team found the almost-pristine wreck of Terror, in deeper water to its companion’s northwest. And then, in September 2014, a search team found the wreck of Erebus, sitting in just 11 meters (36 feet) of water. Erebus and Terror Wrecks Foundįor 170 years, such snippets were all that existed. Stories from local Inuit of white men who had slowly perished of ships that had been caught in, and then disappeared beneath, the ice. Letters from one of the men, some written phonetically and some backward and few fully deciphered. Other clues trickled in: An abandoned sled, with two skeletons and numerous personal effects.

Erebus bodies