Crucially, the flight crew of Flight 901 was not notified of the change. The Navigation section changed the McMurdo waypoint co-ordinate stored in the ground computer system at approximately 1:40 am on the morning of the flight.
#Mt. erebus wiki update
For reasons that were disputed, this triggered Air New Zealand's Navigation section to resolve to update the McMurdo waypoint coordinates stored in the ground computer to correspond with the coordinates of the McMurdo TACAN beacon, despite this also not corresponding with the approved route. After his flight, Captain Simpson advised Air New Zealand's Navigation section of the difference in positions. However, because of a typing error in the coordinates when the route was computerised, the printout from Air New Zealand's ground computer system presented at the 9 November briefing corresponded to a southerly flight path down the middle of the wide McMurdo Sound, approximately 27 miles (43 km) to the west of Mount Erebus. The majority of the previous 13 flights had also entered this flight plan's coordinates into their aircraft navigational systems and flown the McMurdo Sound route, unaware that the route flown did not correspond with the approved route.Ĭaptain Leslie Simpson, the pilot of a flight on 14 November and also present at the 9 November briefing, compared the coordinates of the McMurdo TACAN navigation beacon (approximately 5 kilometres (3.1 mi) east of McMurdo NDB), and the McMurdo waypoint that his flight crew had entered into the INS (Inertial Navigation System), and was surprised to find a large distance between the two. The flight plan that had been approved in 1977 by the Civil Aviation Division of the New Zealand Department of Transport was along a track directly from Cape Hallett to the McMurdo non-directional beacon (NDB), which, coincidentally, entailed flying almost directly over the 12,448-foot (3,794 m) peak of Mount Erebus. On 9 November 1979, 19 days before departure, the two pilots attended a briefing in which they were given a copy of the previous flight's flight plan. Jim Collins and Greg Cassin had never flown to Antarctica before (while flight engineer Gordon Brooks had flown to Antarctica only once previously), but they were experienced pilots and were qualified for the flight. The pilots consisted of Captain Jim Collins, first-officer Greg Cassin, and flight engineer Gordon Brooks. This flight was supposed to leave Auckland Airport in the morning and spend a few hours flying over the Antarctic continent, before returning to Auckland in the evening via Christchurch. Air New Zealand had been operating scheduled Antarctic sightseeing flights between 19. The Mount Erebus disaster occurred on 28 November 1979 when Air New Zealand Flight 901 flew into Mount Erebus on Ross Island, Antarctica, killing all 237 passengers and 20 crew on board.
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