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Remembering Antarctica’s Worst Accident
With the Antarctic tourist season begun – more than 40,000 will visit the seventh continent during the upcoming austral summer – yesterday’s memorial of the thirtieth anniversary of the worst accident ever on the continent was evermore relevant. AFP reports on the visit of relatives of the accident to the site of the accident. For obvious reasons, flyover tourism of Antarctica was stopped after the 1979 accident, resumed only again last year:
Six relatives of 257 people killed during an Air New Zealand sightseeing flight to Antarctica 30 years ago returned to the crash site Friday to mark the anniversary. The airline arranged for the relatives to be flown to McMurdo Sound in Antarctica on a U.S. Air Force flight.
Helicopters then flew the family members to the crash site on Mt. Erebus, although plans to land had to be postponed because of bad weather, Television New Zealand reported. “There are no words for this, it is incredibly beautiful,” said Pip Collins, daughter of Jim Collins, the captain of the DC10 aircraft which crashed into the mountain on November 28, 1979
Eric Houghton, the son of one of the victims, said: “I’ve been here probably hundreds of times in my mind but nothing prepares you for the vastness, emptiness and beauty of the place.” Memorial services will be held at New Zealand’s Antarctic center at Scott Base, as well as Auckland and Christchurch, on Saturday.
Air New Zealand apologized last month for its treatment of families of the crash victims, saying they had not received the support and compassion they deserved
The worst air disaster in New Zealand history was mired in controversy after a judicial inquiry overturned an earlier finding of pilot error, and blamed the airline for incorrectly programming the aircraft’s navigational computers.
