To have done what the chief investigator claimed, there would have to be an “unlikely level of simultaneous incompetence on behalf of all the crew members” Vette told a local newspaper. While the government investigation said the pilots had been flying too low and in limited visibility, Vette challenged the finding. After an official government report blamed pilot error, a Royal Commission inquiry to review that conclusion found that Air New Zealand had altered the routing on the flight, taking it over high terrain without notifying the pilots, who had been briefed that the flight would be flying over ocean and west of Mt. Erebus on a clear day in November 1979, killing all 257 people onboard.

Erebus disaster that challenged the official government explanation for the crash and accused Air New Zealand of a cover-up campaign.Īir New Zealand Flight 901 was a one-day sightseeing flyover of Antarctica. But he was also the subject of controversy when his work became part of an investigation into the 1979 Mt. He was 82.Ĭaptain Vette was the subject of two movies and the recipient of numerous honors for heroics carried out while flying DC-10s for Air New Zealand.

Alwyn Gordon Vette, a New Zealander pilot whose independent analysis of an airplane crash in Antarctica helped to identify an important hazard in Arctic flying, died Sunday at a hospital in Auckland after a long illness.

Mount erebus plane crash bodies