Paul Holmes: Tears still for a nation's sadness

Thirty years ago, this weekend. November 29, 1979, the day of national agony, when the nation learned that Jim Collins' DC10 had ploughed at full thrust into the lower slopes of Antarctica's Mt Erebus.

Before that fateful day, I imagine few of us had ever heard of Erebus. Since then there is not one of us who has not. The mountain's name has come to mean only one thing, the loss of life in that ferocious fraction of a second as the giant machine collided with the ancient, fiery Erebus with vast explosive force.

I was not living in New Zealand at the time. I had already been in Europe for some years. I have spoken lots over the years to broadcasting colleagues about what that night was like here. None of them has forgotten. Each has a story and those on duty that night all have some special moment or event to relate.

I was in Amsterdam. I had a job reading news on the Dutch World Service. A few weeks before Erebus, I bought a beautiful radio that received FM, long wave and medium wave signals. The BBC World Service, just across the North Sea, in those days broadcast a very clear signal on long wave. It beamed the news-reading voices into Holland with a rich, throaty sound. One day, I turned on the BBC news in the little apartment I rented with a South African couple from Johannesburg.

It was early afternoon in Holland. I do not remember the lead story in the bulletin. The second or third item, however, stopped me in my tracks. An Air New Zealand DC10 with 257 people on board was overdue on a sightseeing flight to Antarctica. It had exhausted the amount of time the fuel it carried allowed it to be in the air.

My immediate thoughts were that the aircraft had suffered structural or engineering failure. Remember, DC10s were, in those days, dropping out of the skies. The first serious malfunction involved the Turkish DC10 flying out of Paris. In another incident, a DC10 lifting out of Chicago had an engine fall off shortly after take-off. An International Airline Pilots' Association lawyer I sat next to on a flight from the London to Los Angeles shortly after the Chicago disaster once told me he had known that pilot and "Wally" flew that aircraft in that instant of engine loss "by the book". The "book", he said, had turned out to be the opposite of what Wally should have done.

Of course, what emerged about the DC10 crash into the slopes of Mt Erebus was infinitely more complicated. And to this day, despite the vast hours of research conducted and the mountains of evidence assembled, no one seems to know for certain why the accident happened.

Some of the finest, most experienced pilots and investigative minds have applied themselves to the question.

To this day, after the Royal Commission, after Muldoon's comments and even after the Privy Council, none of us can be certain. It is sad and infuriating. Nothing about the Erebus disaster was ever simple.

Was Justice Mahon right or wrong? We still debate it. Was the airline to blame for the inaccurate co-ordinates it demanded be programmed into the aircraft's guidance system which put Jim Collins 43km to the east of where he ought to have been, on track not up McMurdo Sound, but on track straight to the dreadful mountain? We still debate it.

Was it simply the issue of whiteout, which the crew had been insufficiently trained to be aware of? Was that the cause? Or was Jim Collins too low for the conditions?

In the end did Captain Collins take that aircraft too low in restricted visibility over terrain he was unfamiliar with? And what were the conditions, anyway? Nothing about the Erebus disaster has ever been without its own whiteout. Nothing has ever been conclusive. That is part of the reason for the prolonged pain of the disaster. No one has really ever had closure.

Please believe me, I hold myself up as no accident or aviation expert. But I think the cause was probably an untidy confluence of most of the above but I do not believe it was pilot error. No rational pilot, except the kamikaze boys, ever flies deliberately into a mountain he can see.

The insidious thing about whiteout is the air appears to be clear. That is what Mahon established with his own photography, in which the horizon appears to be clear, distant and flat.

Add to that, Captain Collins was, because of his guidance system, sure that he was over the flat sea of McMurdo Sound. In fact, he was 43km to the west, on track to Erebus.

Having said that, with the doubts being expressed in the cockpit about what landmarks they were looking at below them, he might have taken the aircraft up until some certainty was established. But he would never have climbed to the 13,000ft he would have needed in order to clear the mountain. It was a sightseeing trip, for heaven's sake! In any case he was flying up McMurdo! His guidance system told him that! And having said that, the cockpit discussion about where they were had only just begun and the aircraft was flying south very fast. As for the conditions, there might have been some cloud. No one, as far as I know, has ever established whether the cloud was dense. It was scattered. That is why, surely, in the passenger photographs taken seconds before impact, the soon-to-be-deceased passengers are standing up, leaning towards the windows. I have always been haunted by those last words in the cockpit that day. There is the Flight Engineer Gordon Brooks saying, suddenly, 26 seconds before impact, "I don't like this". (I used the same words, actually, in deliberate, half serious echo of Gordon Brooks, moments before our helicopter crashed in the sea in atrocious conditions at Anauru Bay, north of Gisborne, in June 1989.) There is the fearsome, loud cockpit warning, "whoop whoop pull up ..."

But most amazing of all are the words Jim Collins uses after that terrible, unexpected ground proximity warning. He doesn't second-guess it. He doesn't say, "What????" He does not shout "Jesus Christ!" What he says immediately and crisply and, as Ron Chippendale reported "with a degree of anxiety in his voice", "Go round power, please".

That is all he says. It speaks volumes of Jim Collins' professionalism. The moment he heard that, at 478km/h of airspeed, I think he would have known they were finished.

The years passed. In the mid-80s I came back to New Zealand. In the summer of 1985-86, I flew north and rented a car at Whangarei and, driving randomly, found the beautiful Matapouri Bay. Staying at what I seem to remember was the motel, was Mrs Collins and her daughters. They were friendly and kind to me. They were having a lovely time but I was mindful of their terrible loss.

Years later I came to know the oldest girl, Kathryn, now a mother of four children herself. I still run into Kathryn every now and then. The last time I spoke to her was, I think, just after the 25th anniversary of Erebus and it was clear from what she told me - and I hope I am not betraying a private conversation - that her dearest wish in life is that her beloved father be clearly and officially exonerated.

It is a wish that should be granted. Captain Jim Collins and First Officer Greg Cassin did nothing wrong.

The Erebus disaster remains so sad. Sad, for the families of the 257. Sad, for a wonderful airline. Sad, for the nation itself.

We can weep still.