Erebus tragedy: 30 years on

Jayne Holtham with her mother Christine. Jayne's father's body was never recovered from the crash. Photo / Greg Bowker

As commemorations take place to remember the victims of the 1979 Air New Zealand crash on Mt Erebus, Jarrod Booker talks to those who lost loved ones, rescuers who helped with the recovery and the son of Justice Peter Mahon, whose inquiry into the tragedy still reverberates.

Jayne Holtham remembers the phone ringing, the receiver falling to the floor and adults screaming.

It was the moment that her family was thrown into turmoil with news that Air New Zealand flight TE901 had gone missing in Antarctica, carrying 257 people. One was her father Bryan Holtham.

"It was pretty freaky, because the adults were literally on their knees screaming and crying," Holtham says.

"My sister, who was 10, was kind of more sort of saying 'no, nothing's happened, nothing's happened'... maybe [trying] to protect me or look after me.

"Not knowing how to deal with kids and grief, we were pretty much shut into a room off the lounge, which had like a glass wall and door, so we could pretty much see and hear everything that was going on."

"I have just got absolutely vivid memories of lots of wailing and screaming, and hitting of walls, and pounding of floors."

In that years that followed, Holtham and her family never heard from Air New Zealand, who employed her father as a sales executive in Christchurch, though he was a passenger on the Erebus flight.

Bryan Holtham's body was never recovered, which has always been painful for the family.

It would be easy to be bitter, but Holtham does not hold grudges.

"We have gone over it and over it. And there were so many things that went wrong on that day, that any one of them would have [caused] that plane crash."

For Air New Zealand to say sorry was "incredible".

"And for me, that's healed a lot of resentment."

Jayne Holtham remembers her father as gentle, always smiling and "hilariously funny". He would towel-dry her hair so vigorously that it hurt "but I loved my Dad so much that I loved it".

She sees the 30th anniversary commemorations as a chance to celebrate her father's life.

"I just want to remember Dad, and try to be happy about it."

* * *

Today is Andrew Bond's birthday, and the 30th anniversary of his greatest loss.

Bond's travel-loving parents, Marilyn and Robbie, were both passengers on the ill-fated Erebus flight, leaving the-then 16-year-old an orphan.

The Christchurch father of two, formerly of Auckland, remembers a strange silence among his remaining family the night the news came of the disaster.

"As soon as you heard [about the crash], you knew pretty much [they were dead]," Bond says. "But... it's sort of one of those things you are told and it takes a while to sink in."

He and his family tried to busy themselves as they waited for more news, and the confirmation came after midnight that the plane's wreckage had been found.

The next day an Air New Zealand employee came around to his grandmother's house where the family had gathered.

"It was quite weird because no-one knew what to say. It was just such a strange environment. And that was that. We never heard anything more."

So it came as a surprise when Air New Zealand announced a couple of months ago its plans to commemorate the 30th anniversary, and an apology followed.

Bond said he had never really given a lot of thought to Air New Zealand, his thoughts over the tragedy had always been with his parents. When he considers the apology now, he realises how "brutal" the airline had been in its silence.

"Being kind to Air New Zealand, I'm sure they were probably as shocked as any of the families. I'm guessing there wasn't a protocol of how to deal with these things.

"I don't think Air New Zealand can apologise for it happening because, in my view, accidents happen. You are apologising because of the way you dealt with it."

Bond and his family will travel to Auckland for a Erebus service today and is looking forward to meeting for the first time other families who lost loved ones.

"And I think that is going to be good. Obviously there is going to be lots of crying together and that sort of thing."

"And obviously you sort of dwell on the what-ifs. What if they hadn't gone, what if we had got to live those 30 years with them, my kids would have grandparents. I suppose that is the stuff that has been robbed."

Bond, himself, could have been on the flight with them. His parents had offered to buy him a ticket, but he had school exams he could not miss.

He has happy childhood memories of the parents he lost, of them pushing his love for art and taking him to galleries when "they were not interested in art at all".

"I think I was probably a little bastard before they died. You get a terribly sobering event like that, and it can go one way or another. I think it turned me into a better person."

* * *

Thirty years on, the scene of the Erebus crash is still vivid in Rex Hendry's mind. And when milestones like the 30th anniversary come up, the visions are clearest of all.

An electrician working at Scott Base, then 24-year-old Hendry was one of the first New Zealanders who viewed the aftermath of the crash. And nothing could have prepared him for what he saw. "The mess was just horrific," says Hendry, who does not get into the grisly details out of respect for the families.

"It was just overwhelming. I can even feel the sensation now. It's just incredibly powerful, and almost incomprehensible. If you didn't see it, you wouldn't have understood the magnitude of it, I guess.

"Those images were clearly imprinted on my brain."

It was after radio traffic with the aircraft went quiet that he and others at Scott Base sensed something was wrong. A few hours later, the aircraft had reached its "point of no return", where either it had run out of fuel or "something really nasty had happened".

The Americans based on the ice, who were better resourced, swung into action with an air search.

A member of search and rescue, Hendry had packed his bag to join search efforts, but about 8pm that same day it was decided he should go to bed to get as much sleep as he could. He was woken at about midnight and told the aircraft had been found by the Americans on the northern slopes of Mt Erebus.

He went up in a helicopter and "sure enough we could determine that it was the DC10".

"Although as we approached, all the features were very indistinct. You couldn't actually see much, the lighting was quite flat. It wasn't until we got over the site, the first thing we recognised of course was the tail fin with the koru symbol on it."

With the weather closing in all the time, they could not get in to land.

"By that stage we had seen from the air that it was highly unlikely that there were any survivors."

Although Hendry had been involved in search and rescue for many years, his training was for crashes involving two-person and four-person aircraft. "At that stage, of course, in New Zealand we just didn't have in our psyche the potential of a large aircraft of this nature going down. Nowadays it flicks through the news in a brief instance."

Hendry was able to get in the next day and set up a base camp near the crash site for police and mountaineers to come to recover and identify bodies.

Awarded a New Zealand Special Service Medal for his work at Erebus, Hendry has returned often to Antarctica, and in recent years has worked as a field guide on tour ships to the continent.

Asked if he wishes he had never been involved, Hendry says: "If the same thing happened again, and I'm still involved in search and rescue, I would still stick my boots on and be out the door. I was 'Johnny on the spot' at the time, and so that was just part of the deal".

* * *

Aviation fuel is all it takes for Greg Gilpin to relive the horrors he dealt with firsthand after the Erebus crash.

"You only have to get a sniff of it and you're back on the mountain. Because everything on the mountain was covered in fuel."

Now a police inspector based in Wellington, Gilpin was one of 11 police sent down to Antarctica for the agonising task of recovering the broken bodies scattered through the snow after the crash.

"It was a sight that you really couldn't prepare yourself for. It was just one of utter human destruction, and the wreckage - it was hard to really take in that an aircraft of that size could disintegrate into such small pieces."

"Through my work, I have dealt with a lot of death. But it was just seeing it on such a large scale."

Police had formed Disaster Victim Identification (DVI) squads only months before the disaster, and Gilpin, then a sergeant in Wellington, was one of those trained up for it and called upon.

Without any mountaineering experience, he was anxious about going to work in such an inhospitable environment.

"I had three young kids, and I had to say goodbye to them and my wife, and... I was certainly thinking 'well, will I ever get back home again'. But I was certainly willing to give it a go. I certainly thought 'I have a job to do and it's got to be done'."

He and other DVI squad members arrived in Antarctica in the early hours of November 30, but the weather meant it was not until December 3 that he and other policemen could be flown by helicopter to the mountain.

"And that was an experience and a half, because the weather had closed right in and we were flying in white-out conditions. The helicopter pilot couldn't find the crash site and eventually there was a clearing, and he spotted it, and we had to jump out on to the snow."

From the helicopter, the crash site was nothing more than "a smudge in the snow".

With the aid of American Navy photographers and mountain safety staff based in Antarctica, teams were formed, working 12 hours a day in cold, miserable conditions, to methodically search in grid patterns over the crash site, which was 700m long and 120m wide.

The terrain was not as steep and severe as Gilpin had feared, but there was constant danger from crevasses, and oxygen cylinders and jagged metal which could become airborne as fierce storms regularly swept over and forced the workers to take shelter in a rapidly set-up base camp.

Bodies were dug out of the snow and photographed, notes taken, and the bodies prepared for transport back to New Zealand. Care was always taken to treat the bodies with the utmost respect and dignity.

"We were thinking of the families back home. We knew people were watching and waiting, wanting their loved ones returned to them. And we were determined to recover every body that was possible to recover. And we did that."

Ultimately, 214 bodies were positively identified, while others recovered could not be identified.

Back home after 14 days in Antarctica, getting back to normal life was difficult. "In those days ... you were more or less expected to get on with it. You wanted to talk to people to get it out of your system."

For Gilpin, the 30th anniversary of the disaster is a sad but important milestone, and a time for reflection.

"It means a lot to me because of my involvement, and I think of those who died and their families, and what they obviously went through. And I think of all my colleagues who worked there with us."

"It certainly affects your life, because it's always there. But you certainly have to get on with your life."

* * *

The day before Justice Peter Mahon handed his incendiary report on Erebus to the Government, he met his son Sam.

"He said 'tomorrow all hell is going to break loose'. And so he knew perfectly well that he had written something that was going startle the nation," Sam Mahon recalled this week.

Justice Mahon famously accused Air New Zealand of an "orchestrated litany of lies" surrounding the tragedy. Some of his defenders believe he was driven to an early death by the high-level criticism that followed.

Sam Mahon sees it differently.

"I have heard people say before that the Erebus event killed him in the end. And I don't agree with that. He had already had a heart attack in his forties ... so his health wasn't great."

"My personal view ... is that he relished conflict, and adversarial competition. And I think this would have been a gift to him, this whole [Erebus] affair, because it exercised his legal mind in a way that many of the cases he was involved in Auckland didn't.

"The bottom line was he had a choice. The choice was to walk away from it, not to make any comment."

"As my father started to sit through the commission, by reading his letters that he was writing to friends at the time, you can see this growing unease in his mind that something terrible had happened. Not just an aeroplane crash, but something more sinister than that."

"The impact on my family was simply that he then fell under fire from the Government, and these criticisms. My father was one of the bravest men I have known. We didn't agree on a lot of things but ... he would never run away from a fight. So they picked the wrong man to try to squeeze."

As far as the 30th anniversary is concerned "nothing for us, I think, has changed", Mr Mahon says.

"Because from our point of view, my father dealt with the case in his own way, and fought it in his own way. The pain of it doesn't increase. It was something that happened, and that was that. And I think it was a good thing that he did. For any of us to be able to stand up, and say 'these people should be held to account' is great. Because in this country ... nobody ever takes account for their actions."