In November 1989, 10 years after the crash of Air New Zealand flight TE 901, chief air accidents investigator Ron Chippindale admitted to me that he knew Air New Zealand had lied about sightseeing flights to Antarctica not being allowed lower than 16,000 feet. But he’d gone along with that fiction, during his own investigation of that terrible disaster, and all through the long royal commission that followed, at the end of which Justice Peter Mahon accused the airline of concocting “palpably false evidence” and “an orchestrated litany of lies.”
Because of that ringing phrase, Justice Mahon became another victim of Mt Erebus, driven from the Bench for it by his fellow judges and a furious prime minister, Rob Muldoon. But Ron Chippindale was an Erebus victim too, never forgiven by many pilots for obstinately supporting the airline’s lie that TE 901 had no right to be flying below 16,000 feet when he knew otherwise.
But even his 1989 admission did not stop Chippindale continuing to accuse the pilots of causing the crash by bad airmanship. Despite conclusive evidence to the contrary, he still held that they were flying at a low altitude knowingly uncertain where they were in the hostile, mountainous Antarctic environment. And he bizarrely told me that they could have saved the DC10 and its 237 passengers and 20 crew by sliding it across the icy slopes it hit to a standstill, rather than letting it smash to smithereens after the ground proximity warning system shrieked its awful “Whoop whoop! Pull up!” That would have been a feat of airmanship unparallelled in aviation history.
When the 25th anniversary of the disaster occurred in November 2004, I went back to Chippindale, by then six years retired, to see if his views about pilot culpability had mellowed with time, but he did not want to talk about it. It was also the occasion of his golden wedding anniversary, doubtless making it doubly poignant for him. “I try to keep a low profile on it these days,” he told me. “A lot of people have paid the price for what happened, and it’s time everyone moved forward.”
And now Ron Chippindale, the proud, ramrod-erect former Air Force squadron leader and long time chief inspector of air accidents, is dead, six weeks short of his 75th birthday, killed by a runaway car while out for his morning walk yesterday. His terrible death will not, however, close the book on the Erebus disaster. It comes during a week when relatives of the 257 people killed all those years ago are insisting the Government should arrange for them to travel to Antarctica next year for the 30th anniversary. The Airline Pilots Association is backing them, with Foreign Affairs Minister Winston Peters somehow being made the bad guy because he visited Antarctica with his partner the other week while the relatives have so far been rebuffed.
The crash of TE 901 profoundly shocked New Zealand. In such a small country, virtually everybody knew, or knew of, somebody who died when the widebody DC10 airliner crashed into the lower slopes of Mt Erebus on Ross Island, while on a sightseeing flight from Auckland that was to have taken it down the middle of the wide, flat McMurdo Sound and over the New Zealand Ross Base and the American McMurdo Base.
With the controversy that followed getting an airing again with Ron Chippindale’s untimely death, it’s a good time to restate the facts and sort them from the myths.
The flight and the crash
At 8.17 am on November 28 1979, flight TE 901, flown by Captain Jim Collins, with First Officer Greg Cassin, Flight Engineer Gordon Brooks, and, as commentator, the seasoned Antarctic explorer Peter Mulgrew, a late replacement for Sir Edmund Hillary, left Auckland taking 237 passengers on a scenic flight to Antarctica, the 14th such flight since they began in February 1977.
Those flights did not land on the ice. On reaching McMurdo Sound, they descended to low levels and made slow passes around Ross Island and the bases there, before returning to New Zealand.
DC10 jets were navigated by a computer system that was highly accurate for the time, though not nearly as advanced as the ones today. They did not have the screens of today that clearly show the position of a plane in relation to the ground and other planes. Before each Antarctic flight, the crew programmed the computer with the latitude and longitude of a series of “waypoints” along the intended route, the details being supplied by Air New Zealand’s flight operations division. Pilots plotted their position from a meter that showed the distance to run to the next waypoint. The waypoints took the flights down the centre of McMurdo Sound to a point in the middle of the sound. Most flights before TE 901, however, were flown manually in the McMurdo area to give passengers the best views. That meant the pilot disconnected the navigation computer before following the programmed track down the sound.
Just hours before TE 901 left, in the dead of night, the final waypoint for the Antarctic flights was changed by Air New Zealand’s flight operations division from the spot in the middle of the sound to a beacon near the McMurdo airfield. The effect of this change was to shift the flight path 43 kilometres to the east, on a direct course towards Mt Erebus, an active volcano on Ross Island. Nobody told the crew of the change. It is clear from their comments, preserved on the cockpit voice recorder, that they believed at all times they were flying in safety over the flat McMurdo Sound, not over the adjacent Lewis Bay towards the mountain.
As the DC-10 approached Ross Island, the McMurdo air traffic control invited Captain Collins to descend, to get under the low cloud ceiling. He did so, in two big descending orbits through a large gap in the clouds, at all times flying “visual meteorological conditions” clear of the clouds, down to 2000 feet, then 1500 feet. A map showing the orbits TE901 followed was published in Ron Chippindale’s 1980 report on the crash, leading to a widespread public belief that Captain Collins was flying in circles and lost in clouds, which was never the case. The DC10 was at all times on its computer track and in clear air, something proven when the hundreds of passenger photographs were developed from films in cameras recovered from the wreckage.
However, a trick of the polar light known as “whiteout” meant that the flight crew could not see the snow-clad mountain ahead of them as they continued south along the computer track at 1500 feet, believing they were over the sound. Even Peter Mulgrew, who had been to Antarctica many times, was fooled, pointing out landmarks he mistakenly named as features of McMurdo Sound. The sun above and behind them reflecting off the snow, and the cloud base extending above them to the mountain slope, had the effect of making the rising slope ahead appear flat, while the entrance to Lewis Bay on either side of them looked like the entrance to McMurdo Sound.
Just before the crash, Flight Engineer Brooks said “I don’t like this,” and Captain Collins announced he was going to fly away. They were discussing whether to turn left or right when the “Whoop whoop! Pull up!” alarm sounded. Collins called for extra power to get away, but the jet slammed into the slope, killing everyone instantly.
In the recriminations that followed, Air New Zealand claimed, deviously, that the navigation computer change had merely corrected an “error” and that the route along the sound followed by all previous flights was itself a mistake. It accused Captain Collins of disregarding a claimed 16,000-foot minimum safety height, which would have taken TE 901 safely over the summit of Mt Erebus. Ron Chippindale accepted this in his report, which exonerated the airline, downplayed the computer change and squarely blamed the pilots, accusing them of continuing the flight in poor visibility while uncertain where they were.
The aftermath and the Mahon Report
Even before Ron Chippindale’s accident report was published, the Muldoon government appointed High Court judge Peter Mahon to conduct a royal commission of inquiry into the crash. The Chippindale report was presented to the inquiry and Chippindale was one of the first witnesses. He resolutely stuck to the position that the pilots had no authority to fly below 16,000 feet, testimony that was rejected by a procession of pilots who said they had flown as low as 1000 feet down the sound on earlier flights with the full knowledge of the airline, which was shown to have promoted what were, after all, sightseeing flights, as travelling at very low altitudes over the ice.
Mahon’s report was published in April 1981 and stunned the nation with its accusation that Air New Zealand had engaged in “an orchestrated litany of lies” to cover up the computer blunder, which he said caused the crash. He exonerated the pilots of all blame, in words even clearer than Ron Chippindale had used to wholly blame them.
Pandemonium followed. Morrie Davis, the airline’s high-profile chief executive, and a friend of Rob Muldoon, resigned, another victim of Erebus. Muldoon savaged Justice Mahon publicly. Air New Zealand went to the Court of Appeal, which stridently criticised the judge, ruling he should not have accused the airline of a cover-up without putting the allegation to its witnesses at the royal commission. Stunned, Mahon resigned as a judge, but appealed to the Privy Council, which, in a damning decision in October 1983, said he had “failed to observe the rules of natural justice” – about the harshest thing that could be said about a judge.
Neither the Privy Council nor the Court of Appeal, however, overturned Mahon’s findings about the computer blunder causing the crash. Their decisions related only to his allegations about an airline conspiracy. The Privy Council actually lauded the judge’s “brilliant and painstaking investigative work” in getting to the cause of the crash.
Justice Mahon died in August 1986, a folk hero to many New Zealanders who felt he had been treated shabbily by the Muldoon government for exposing the truth about TE 901.
Many people, including a group of fellow judges, urged the Labour Government elected in 1984 to knight Mahon, but it did not happen. When he died, there was a clamour of calls for a posthumous honour. Sir Geoffrey Palmer, who was minister of justice and deputy prime minister at the time, was particularly disdainful to the idea of a knighthood. In 2004, I asked him why. He replied: “Justice Mahon was a very eminent New Zealander and he did a lot of good things, but [the Erebus report] wasn’t one of them. The courts found he had breached natural justice. It’s still one of the leading cases about natural justice, it’s quoted all the time. Those were difficulties that didn’t warrant the hero status people had of him.”
In its 1983 decision, the Privy Council expressed the wish that everyone caught up in the Erebus disaster would move on from it. “The time has now come for all parties to let bygones be bygones so far as the aftermath of the Mt Erebus disaster is concerned. The time for bitter feelings is over,” the Law Lords wrote. It was a faint hope then, and just as faint all these years later. Just as the death of Ron Chippindale and calls for the relatives to visit the ice have returned it to public prominence, so will the 30th anniversary next year doubtless open the whole debate yet again. All these years on, opinions remain so polarised that it is difficult to see how the victims of Erebus can ever get closure.
15 Comments
February 13, 2008 at 7:26 am
Perhaps I’m wrong but it seems to me the only people who would be reluctant to accept Mahon’s verdict are those officials who have a vested interest in not re-opening old wounds.
I find the maxim “There is nothing so vigorously defended as a vested interest disguised as an intellectual conviction” is a very useful tool particularly when analysing the justice system in respect of a potential miscarraige.
February 13, 2008 at 9:07 am
Excellent piece. Your blog has rapidly become a “must read”.
For those of use with long memories, there was a fascinating prequel to the Erebus affair that came frighteningly close to being equally traumatic.
In about 1975 a DC10 was making a routine instrument landing into Wellington from the north late one evening. It was dark, and the cloud cover lowish. Suddenly the pilot and co-pilot were stunned to see the living room windows of peoples’ homes appear either side of them. The pilot even vividly recalled a fleeting glimpse of TV set flashing by. Instinctively they reacted to pull the plane up. The co-pilot in charge of the stick tried to get the nose up; the Captain immediately applied full throttle to avoid a stall.
The Flight Engineer not seeing outside thought his crew had lost their senses; applying full throttle from idle in a DC10 stood a very real risk of flaming out all four engines. He leapt forward and began a frantic “tug of war” with the Captain over the throttle setting… which finished up around 75%… but for some moments this big plane and all on board tettered on the brink of catastrophe, between hitting the hills, stalling or losing all four engines. No-one knows quite how close they came to striking Newlands, but the altimeter record suggested that at one point there were mere feet in it.
Of course the people below were shocked by the noise of a DC10 going to full throttle this close over their heads. It made headlines the next day. The locals had been complaining for weeks about planes arriving very low over JVille, and this was the last straw.
The CAA and Air NZ held inquiries. It turned out that pilots had been reporting for weeks that the northern approach beacon had been intermittently faulty for months and nothing had been done about it. Most domestic pilots had either experienced it or knew about it, and were making allowances for it. The DC10 was unlucky in that the crew who normally flew international flights and only occasionally landed in Wgtn had not heard the internal talk and were unaware of the hazard awaiting them.
But at the inquiries the CAA lead by Chippindale insisted that the DC10 crew were at fault for ignoring their altimeter. The response was obvious, in that Wgtn’s steep and frequent hills meant that on all northern approaches the altimeter bounced around rapidly and was mostly ignored. Air NZ happily followed the CAA’s line, charged Captain Don Nichol with incompetence, and demoted him. At the time Don held the rank of Senior Training Pilot and was responsible for all pilot training AND I believe had input to the waypoint settings used by inertial navigation system.
Don’s response was along the lines, “If I’m incompetent, then so are all your other pilot’s whom I’ve been training for years” and he resigned. It was after this that I believe pilot input into determining the guidance system waypoints was taken away from them… which in turn set up the Erebus disaster a few years later in 1979.
The fact is, Erebus was not the first time Chippindale and AirNZ covered up for their own mistakes and pushed the blame onto the pilots. They had a history of this sort of thing. There is a link between the Newlands incident and Erebus. Failure to deal correctly with the former, created the conditions in which the latter became almost inevitable.
February 13, 2008 at 10:03 am
I grew up right beside the airport in that time and don’t recall ever seeing a DC1o land there. Are you sure about that. DC8s yes. Even for a while the Qantas 747SP. But never a DC10.
I would have thought the runway would have been way to short for those beasts
February 13, 2008 at 10:05 am
Yes you are right. I’m going solely by memory here, and a DC8 it could well have been. The details are 30 years ago, but the story was told to me first hand.
February 13, 2008 at 10:19 am
The following is from the Herald (online) November 26, 2007.
Anderton wants Government to vindicate pilots.
By Juliet Rowan
Progressive Party leader Jim Anderton wants a Government declaration that the pilots of the aircraft that slammed into Mt Erebus were not responsible for the disaster, which shook the nation.
Mr Anderton, the Economic Development Minister, said he would seek Cabinet support for “some public acknowledgement” that Captain Jim Collins and co-pilot Greg Cassin were not to blame for the crash.
Memorial services were held throughout the country and in Antarctica yesterday.
The captain’s widow, Maria Collins, believes the pair were vindicated when Parliament finally accepted in 1999 a controversial report of Justice Peter Mahon blaming the tragedy on Air New Zealand’s failure to tell the pilots of a late change to computer navigation coordinates.
National MP Maurice Williamson, who tabled the report as Minister of Transport, said it was one of the proudest moments of his career.
But the eldest of the Captain Collins’ four daughters, Kathryn Carter, believes Air NZ or the Government, as its main shareholder, should issue a clear apology for a stain left on the crew’s reputation by the airline’s previous attempts to blame the crash on pilot error.
Former chief air accidents inspector Ron Chippindale said his original report pinning the probable cause of the crash on an alleged decision of the captain to fly low toward an area of poor definition was still recognised by the International Civil Aviation Organisation.
Mr Anderton noted that the International Federation of Airline Pilots’ Associations had given Mr Mahon – who was denied a knighthood before he died in 1986 aged 62 – its top award for the excellence of the judge’s report.
“They said it created a benchmark in looking further than the usual pilot-error argument and trying to find out in a very systematic way why this crash occurred,” Mr Anderton said.
Jacinta Cassin, daughter of co-pilot Greg Cassin, said an apology would be “lovely but not expected”.
February 15, 2008 at 12:13 pm
Redlogix,
I enjoyed reading your post. I have not heard of this incident before, it certainly sounds believable and given what happened with the Erebus coverup, I don’t doubt that it happaned.
You mentioned the DC10’s 4 engines – DC10’s only have 3 engines. So I’d have to agree with Insider, that it was likely to be a DC8.
June 9, 2008 at 8:49 pm
What a well written blog. It’s nice to find someone who can both get the facts right and write them in a way people can understand.
I also found the story from Redlogix fascinating as well. It answered a niggling question I had always had regarding Mr Chippendale. I’ll never understand his choices but at least I know it wasn’t the first time.
I would like to get in touch with the original blogger if that’s possible.
By the way, the quote “lovely but not expected” never quite conveyed the cynicism in my voice.
June 10, 2008 at 6:21 pm
I also found the story from Redlogix fascinating as well. It answered a niggling question I had always had regarding Mr Chippendale. I’ll never understand his choices but at least I know it wasn’t the first time.
Ah, you are talking about RedLogix’s comment that Ron Chippindale was responsible for the investigation of the 1975 “Newlands Incident,” where an Air NZ DC8 almost hit the roofs of houses as it approached Wellington from the north.
After Redlogix described that incident, I inquired of the Civil Aviation Authority and posted their response in my Saturday Updates of February 16. This was what I wrote:
By the way, the quote “lovely but not expected” never quite conveyed the cynicism in my voice.
I do not doubt that for a moment. Thank you very much for posting your comment.
For other readers, this commenter is the daughter of First Officer Greg Cassin, one of the pilots on TE 901.
June 10, 2008 at 8:55 pm
Interesting to read after 33 years the comments submitted by RedLogix on an event which had a marked effect on my life and that of my family.
The general tale is correct but there are some major errors ~ as stated in later blog it was a DC8 not a DC10 ~ I was flying the aircraft, not the co-pilot ~ the flight engineer was certainly startled by my response and we did have a tussle to get the best possible power setting. I was later able to analyse the flight data recorder and know that the aircraft was less than a wingspan away from the housetops and have since met several families who were resident in the path of the aircraft and who were able to tell me how startled they were.
The residents of Newlands had a local committee that had been constantly expressing concern about the possibility of an incident we proved possible.
I was not the most senior training captain but had been training other pilots on both the aircraft and simulator for quite some time, however following the incident my opinion was regarded as not of much worth and the possibility of finding a solution was lost in the corporate desire to have a scapegoat.
Ron Chippindale was not part of the enquiry as it was deemed an incident, not an accident, instead two separate enquiries by ANZ and CAA were made, and without any legal recourse, both the First Officer and I were demoted. After a year of what can only be described as [not so] subtle pressure, I left the airline and flying which was a deeply sad experience considering my love of flying.
An appeal I made to the Ombudsman two years after the event resulted in a finding that we had been “denied natural justice.”
It should be pointed out that the DC8 did not have inertial navigation and the details of the approach procedure and my interpretation of the real cause of the problem are too complex for a blog.
I do have to pay a tribute to both my First Officer and the Flight Engineer, whose analysis of and response to the situation were of the highest professional standard.
Finally, my experience of flying in and out of Wellington Airport was considerable, having begun with NAC in the mid 1950s on DH Heron aircraft before the building of the runway and then in DC3s for 10 years before changing employment to Air New Zealand, so having been actively involved in hundreds of take-offs and landings, there is no suggestion that unfamiliarity with the airport might have been a contributing factor.
Don Niccol
June 14, 2008 at 6:41 am
Hello Don,
As you can see my recollection of the Newlands story is tainted with factual errors, but when you we talking to me about it all those years ago I was not thinking at the time that 30 years later I would be posting about it in an online blog. Hell that was when we designed PC boards with stickon donuts and black tape, computers took up whole rooms and the internet had not even been thought of. How things have changed.
But some things do not change, and the esse tial lesson of the events you went through always remained with me; that when things go embarrassingly wrong, organisations will instinctively look for scapegoats to serve up, rather than examine or acknowledge their own systemic failures that were the real and persistent causes.
I also vividly recall also just how angry and hurt you were by the investigation process, the fact that you and your crew had so narrowly and skillfully averted a major disaster seemed to mean little in the face of the “always blame the pilot” mentality that prevailed in those days. If I wrongly associated Chippendale with the actual investigation, it is still true that the man was a senior and powerful influence on the culture and thinking of that organisation. When the events of Erubus unfolded just a few years later and I saw how the treatment you received, was visited on the Erubus crew (only writ so much larger)… the inevitable connection was made in my mind at the time.
I was delighted to see your post Don. Best Regards.
November 30, 2008 at 9:36 pm
To me there are some very naive comments on this site written by people who are apparently ill informed and, perhaps because they are grieving, are wrongly maligning a very professional man with high ethical standards. If this is the best thing you people have to do I feel very sorry for you. To make ill comments about someone now deceased is a very low thing to do.
January 23, 2009 at 6:23 am
‘To make ill comments about someone now deceased is a very low thing to do’.
Fully agree – presumably this courtesy extends to not blaming a deceased flight crew for an accident that was beyond their control, and then publishing this as the primary cause for Erebus accident?
February 12, 2009 at 5:58 pm
Filou, on what grounds can you base your comment? Do you have all the facts? Were you there? Are you qualified to make the judgement you have, Filou? Do you make the comments you do because you are a relative of one of the deceased? If the latter is true, I can understand your grief. Why not move forward…that would be the wisest thing to do rather than harbour the grudge you, and others, are apparently harbouring. This accident was many, many years ago. To reply in the vein you did is maybe doing you more harm than those you have aimed it at.
June 27, 2009 at 11:07 pm
Sentiments on Erebus will never be forgotten, but the true sentiment is the respect to all who have been lost along the way, those in the tragedy itself and those who dealt with it’s aftermath. May they rest in peace forever.
It is true this accident was a long time ago and it is true I was not there and was not involved. It is, I think, also true that over the years we have gained so much from this, but yet we still have so much to learn.
October 9, 2009 at 10:25 am
You all miss the point. The powers-that-be don’t want us common folk peeking at Antarctica. This was no accident.