Erebus - the icy questions

Memorial to the more than 250 New Zealanders who lost their lives on the slopes of Mt Erebus, Antarctica. Photo / Supplied

Ian Hambly spent six horrifying weeks in an Auckland morgue searching for his mates. As body after body arrived from the carnage that was Erebus, Hambly, a former traffic and police officer turned Air New Zealand steward, searched the faces and features hoping he would recognise the 21 Air New Zealand crew, most of whom he had worked with.

Hambly volunteered to help with "Operation Overdue" to speed up the crew identification and to spare distressed relatives the gruesome task. But the mission eventually ruined his marriage and family life and haunted him in the years that came after.

By the end of those six weeks, only one crew member's body was still missing - 23-year-old Aucklander Dianne Keenan. It's a regret he still has today. "I stayed there for the whole six weeks hoping to find her," Hambly says.

Instead, two months later, searchers spotted her body - identified by her teal-coloured uniform - lying at the bottom of a deep crevasse. The Keenan family were told it was too dangerous to risk retrieving her body and Dianne has been in that icy grave ever since.

All Hambly could give Dianne's shocked and grieving family was a singed diary, and even that small memento has left a question unanswered for three decades. Dianne's name - written at the top right-hand corner of the first page - was missing, ripped out by an unidentified person. And her diary initially arrived back in Auckland labelled as belonging to the chief pilot, Jim Collins, in place of his black diary, thought to contain navigational briefing notes. Her family want to know why.

That mystery, and a list of others, is one reason the Erebus wounds are as deep today as they were in November 1979, when Flight 901 was declared overdue, then confirmed crashed, plunging a nation and a proud airline into shock.

At first, ambulances carrying Erebus victims made their way slowly along Karangahape Rd, having collected their tragic cargo from a Hercules at Whenuapai Air Base. They travelled across Grafton Bridge to the door of the morgue. Passersby stopped, shocked, and watched them go by. "It was an awful thing." Hambly murmurs.

But as the numbers of dead grew, a large refrigerated truck was hired. With police and medical staff only able to process up to 15 bodies a day, that truck became a makeshift morgue.

Hambly had dealt before with victims in traffic accidents, but nothing could prepare him for the horror that was Erebus.

Many of the passengers were standing when Flight 901 hit 3795m-high Mt Erebus at 480km/h. The snow-covered mountain simply disappeared from view and the pilots, thinking they were flying 43km to the west because of incorrect navigational co-ordinates, literally flew into it.

Some bodies, like those in the cockpit, which broke off, were remarkably unmarked. Others were dismembered or badly burned when a fireball of burning aviation fuel erupted in the main fuselage. Forty-four passengers were never identified. What remains of them lies in 16 coffins buried in a mass grave at the Erebus Memorial Garden at Waikumete Cemetery in Auckland.

The reek of kerosene permeated everything, covering the crash site in a sticky, oily coating and - years later - triggering jarring memories for the recovery team.

Hambly's job was to liaise with the families and return possessions that arrived back from McMurdo Base in Antarctica. "That was the most difficult thing I had to do. Here's someone's watch, here's someone's bag, this is all I can give you back."

And afterwards, the funerals. He attended 15 in all.

But for the Keenan family, that funeral never came. They waited, hoping that Dianne would be found and finally, when her body was spotted in the crevasse, they held a memorial service.

Dianne's younger brother Philip hopes that one day his sister can be brought home. "If only it was possible to retrieve her body. It would be a nice thought that maybe we could some day."

Next week, Keenan will try to get near to where Dianne lies, when he, with four other family members, visits the crash site for a memorial service. Names of those attending were selected by ballot and Keenan was overwhelmed to discover that while he had not been selected, the sister of steward Jim Lewis gave up her place for him.

In the months before the crash, during a Los Angeles crew lay-over, Keenan and Lewis, who were good friends, had travelled together to Las Vegas to see Sammy Davis jnr perform.

Her mother died this year without being able to give Dianne a proper burial, Philip says. The fact that no one had accepted culpability had been hard, he says. "It just kept on and on. You don't get closure."

Closure for Hambly is impossible, too. He lives surrounded by Erebus files and mementoes, including a special services medal he and others were awarded three years ago.

He shakes his head at a bizarre collection of memories, like the Auckland funeral director who sent a $1000 bill for flowers to Accident Compensation - which paid for the crew's funerals - when the dead man's widow had cut all the flowers from her own garden.

Among Hambly's mementoes is a faded commemorative menu of an Air New Zealand flight to the ice two years before the Erebus crash. Hambly was a steward on that flight, captained by Gordon Vette, a senior pilot who later assisted Peter Mahon in his Commission of Inquiry into the disaster.

Hambly dismisses claims that Air New Zealand executives had no knowledge of low-level flying over Antarctica. It happened on the 1977 flight he crewed, during which "Peach Erebus" was on the dessert menu.

"We were at 1300 feet as we flew over Williams Field [Antarctica]. We were all standing on the flight deck when we swooped down low."

On board that day was a senior Air New Zealand executive. Hambly says an experienced pilot like Vette would not have breached the minimum safety altitudes with the "number two executive" on board unless he knew Air New Zealand was aware of the practice.

And so the debate rumbles on, despite an air accident report, a Royal Commission of Inquiry, a Privy Council ruling and various private reports on the likely causes. The what-ifs, whys and hows are thrashed out again and again when the main players meet at anniversary services or unveilings.

And, despite Air New Zealand's apology last month over its handling of the tragedy, the wounds are still as deep as the dark gash made on the snowy flanks of a volcano on Ross Island in Antarctica.

Log on to the New Zealand Airline Pilots' Association's Erebus website and the intensity behind the ongoing debate is obvious. So is the hurt of family members who lost loved ones and may never understand the full story, or which version to believe. And as the years pass, fewer people will care. Hambly recalls talking to a young Air New Zealand employee at a function this year and was astounded to learn that she had not heard of Erebus or Justice Peter Mahon's famous "orchestrated litany of lies" condemnation of the airline.

But the families of those who died still live with the tragedy every day. Thirty years ago retired lawyer Keith Peterson was junior counsel acting for the Mt Erebus DC10 Passenger Consortium - 199 claimants, including the families of most of the New Zealanders, some of the cabin crew and some of the foreigners on board.

The government-owned Air New Zealand and its insurers, including Lloyds of London, and the Government had to pay out $20 million compensation. Peterson says the amount of compensation was a secondary issue.

"We really wanted to know why they [Flight 901] had hit the deck. We represented the whole of New Zealand in our drive to find out. The consortium set out to embarrass the airline publicly and skilfully and we achieved it. I know we did."

The airline's insurers, rather than Air New Zealand, were "doing their damndest to block us", he says.

The consortium was suing not only Air New Zealand - for failures in the route planning of Flight 901, failure to adequately train the pilots and for breaches of good aviation practice by the pilots - but the Attorney General (representing the real target, the Ministry of Transport's civil aviation division) for failing to adequately monitor the planning and preparation of the flight.

Peterson believes the case, and the details which would be exposed, put the airline under "immense pressure". It was forced to settle two years and 10 months after the crash, but before the court hearing.

Peterson, who says he has "lived with this thing for 30 years", later wrote a detailed, book-length report, which was accepted by the Royal Aeronautical Society.

He says he wrote it as a memorial to the passengers.

"We didn't make money out of it [the case]," he says. "We were driven because it was a national tragedy."

Notebook mystery

If there is one lingering mystery that still shadows Erebus' dark history, it is what happened to the pages in a black ringbinder diary belonging to Captain Jim Collins, the man in charge of Flight 901.

It is a mystery that fuels the conspiracy theories and still plagues those closely involved with the tragedy 30 years on. And it is a question that has troubled the Collins family, to the point where they approached the police last year asking for another investigation.

Christchurch detective Malcolm Burgess, who headed that investigation, told the Herald on Sunday this week that the mystery of the missing pages was still "not solved".

What is known is that the diary was found on the ice near Collins' body and the pilot's flight bag, which later went missing and has never been found. The police officer who found the diary, Stuart Leighton, says at that stage the pages were still inside and the wording and numbers were legible.

Leighton, 22 at the time and the youngest in the Erebus body-recovery team, showed the diary to the team head, Greg Gilpin. The diary was sent back to McMurdo Base that day, with another small, red pocket diary belonging to Collins.

What happened after that is a mystery. Somehow, when former Air New Zealand steward Ian Hambly opened a box of crew belongings at the Auckland morgue, the two diaries under Collins' name were different. The red one was there and so was a small, brown diary, singed round the edges and with the top right-hand corner of the first page - where the name had been - ripped out. That diary was later found to belong to Dianne Keenan, a young stewardess on the flight.

By the time the black diary found its way back to Collins' widow, Maria, the pages seen by Leighton and Gilpin at the crash site were gone.

After the Royal Commission of Inquiry, a senior Air New Zealand pilot, Bruce Crosby, came forward and said he recalled, after being reminded by his wife, that he probably removed some pages from the diary because they were soaked in kerosene.

But Burgess thinks Crosby might be confusing them with hand-written notes still tucked inside the cover of the diary, now in the National Archives.

Yet the detective believes everyone he interviewed was at pains to help solve the mystery and was telling the truth.

Leighton remembers seeing what he took to be hand-written briefing notes and calculations in Collins' black diary. What was Collins told at a briefing three weeks before the doomed flight, and what co-ordinates did he make a note of?

Hambly was startled to hear Crosby tell the inquiry that he had returned two diaries - a red and a black one - to the Collins family, diaries given to him by Hambly.

Hambly was quick to tell the legal team that he had never seen the black ringbinder diary. To this day he doesn't know how it arrived back in Auckland and whose hands it passed through. "I know there was a cover-up because I got caught up in it."

Burgess says that, according to his investigation, both of Collins' diaries were inspected at McMurdo by an air accident inspector who concluded there was nothing relevant in either of them. Air New Zealand staff were not present, he says.

Burgess has a theory that Crosby saw lists - names, addresses and numbers - which are still in the inside cover of the diary. Those numbers are compound interest calculations made by Collins, jotted on the back of a briefing sheet for Honolulu. For that reason, Burgess can't find evidence of a "conspiracy" on the part of Air New Zealand.