There were no survivors.Īuthorities conducted two official investigations after the crash. The search crews discovered that the New Zealand airplane had crashed on the side of Mount Erebus. A little over an hour later personnel at the air traffic control center sent out search-and-rescue airplanes. About five minutes later, all communication with the airplane crew stopped. The pilots reported that the plane would be descending to 2,000 feet (610 meters) to give the passengers a closer view of Antarctica. Navy’s air traffic control center at McMurdo Station on Ross Island. As the airplane approached the continent, the pilots contacted the U.S. The flight took off on time and within a few hours was near Antarctica. The new path took the plane over Ross Island and Mount Erebus, an active volcano 12,450 feet (3,800 meters) high, rather than over McMurdo Sound. Those new coordinates put the plane’s flight path 28 miles (45 kilometers) east of the regular route. Unknown to the pilots, however, earlier that morning Air New Zealand’s navigation center, thinking it was making a minor adjustment, changed two of the coordinates. The coordinates guided the plane’s direction and allowed the aircraft to fly automatically to its destination.

Before leaving, the pilots entered latitude and longitude coordinates into the airplane’s computer navigation system. The flight path took them over the flat water and sea ice of McMurdo Sound to the continent. They had never flown the Antarctica route, but they had studied the flight path. On the morning of November 28, 1979, the pilots of that day’s sightseeing flight prepared for takeoff. The flights were popular and regularly sold out. The 11-hour, nonstop flights departed from Auckland and provided views and photographic opportunities of Antarctica. In 1977 Air New Zealand began offering scenic flights over Antarctica in McDonnell Douglas DC-10s. The crash was the worst civil disaster in New Zealand’s history.

All 237 passengers and 20 crew members were killed. In 1979 a New Zealand sightseeing airplane crashed into Mount Erebus, a volcano on Ross Island in Antarctica.

Mount erebus eruption