1/31/2024 0 Comments Flight to mt erebus![]() ![]() Supporting Ted’s stance, he also suggested a change of course. Meanwhile, 75 nautical miles away at Vanda, Gary had also communicated with the flight crew. “I became quite concerned from then on,” he says. Ted recollects that the crew acknowledged his call, but he did not hear from them again. When the crew was about an hour north of Ross Island, Ted suggested to pilot Jim Collins that he, instead, divert to fly over the dry valley region, near Vanda Station, which was clear. I had already curtailed any activity, such as helicopters, around the island and I advised the TE901 pilot to not come anywhere near Ross Island.” “But,” says Ted, “we knew there were whiteout conditions there. They knew about the tourist flight and that it was going to be heading close to them to look at Ross Island in McMurdo Sound. The day that Air New Zealand Flight TE901 crashed into Mt Erebus during a sightseeing tour, Gary and Ted were both on duty. The reasons why that might have been the case have also been a source of concern for the two men, now in their late seventies. Ted says he did tell authorities at the time about their communications with the plane’s crew, warning of whiteout conditions and suggesting an alternative route, but it appears that wasn’t considered relevant to the post-crash inquiries. Indeed, it’s a picture that has apparently never been fully recorded in official accounts of the tragedy and that has been bothering these men. “There were some of us in Antarctica who were communicating with the DC10 pilot by HF radio prior to the crash and have recollections that paint a slightly different picture,” Gary says. What has been troubling Gary and Ted in that time, however, is what happened before the crash that claimed the lives of 257 people. Gary, who later joined New Zealand Police’s technical support unit, says commentary on Erebus over the intervening years has generally been based on post-crash analysis and theories. Geophysicist Gary Lewis was the team leader at Vanda Station and Senior Constable Ted Robinson was the second in command at nearby Scott Base, along with Nigel Roberts, who was on leave from Canterbury University working for four months as New Zealand’s information officer and photographer in Antarctica. The circumstances surrounding New Zealand’s worst aviation disaster and the ensuing controversial enquiries about its causes are of particular interest to them because they were all there when it happened. ![]() Top of mind for the trio was the 40 th anniversary of the Erebus crash, due to be commemorated on November 28 next year. Above: Nigel Roberts' famous photo of the wreckage on Mt Erebus.Ī small but significant reunion was held in Wellington last month when three Antarctic veterans, two of them former police officers, gathered to reminisce about their time on the ice in the late 1970s. ![]()
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