![]() Many of these photos were later found in the wreckage and could still be developed, some of them taken seconds before the crash. On board the DC 10, people were busy taking photographs or filming in the cabin and out of the windows. Assuming he was on the same flight path as previous flights and over the vast McMurdo Sound, he wouldn’t have foreseen any problems. What better way to spend a day than to cruise on an 11-hour non-stop round trip from Auckland down the length of the country and on to the great southern continent? The flights offered first class luxury and a stunning view over the endless ice at the edge of the world.īut on that day in 1979, things would go very wrong.Īt around noon, the pilot Capt Jim Collins flew two large loops through the clouds to bring the plane down to about 2,000ft (610m) and offer his passengers a better view. How did the plane crash?Īir New Zealand had started operating scenic flights over Antarctica only two years before, and they had been a great success. The tragedy of flight TE901 was a shock for New Zealand, affecting almost everyone in the country in some way, and led to years of investigations and a bitter blame game.Īnd the legacy of the Mt Erebus disaster is still felt 40 years on. On 28 November 1979, a sightseeing aircraft carrying 257 people crashed head-on into the side of a volcano in Antarctica. It remains New Zealand’s worst peacetime disaster. Caption by Michon Scott, based on image interpretation by Ashley Davies, Jet Propulsion Laboratory.TE901 crashed head-on into the gentle slopes of Mount Erebus NASA image created by Jesse Allen, using EO-1 ALI data provided courtesy of the NASA EO-1 Team. ![]() The volcano was erupting when British explorer Captain James Ross first observed it 1841, and it has shown continuous lava lake activity since 1972. Erebus is a stratovolcano composed of alternating layers of solidified ash, hardened lava, and rocks ejected by earlier eruptions. ![]() This Mount Erebus image shows a fairly typical level of activity for the volcano, including a molten lava lake and vapor emissions. Since that time, EO-1 has been successfully employed to detect other volcanic eruptions, including those near densely populated areas. Scientists who subsequently examined the data EO-1 acquired confirmed that a genuine thermal emission had been detected. After the initial detection, the satellite gave itself new orders to take fresh observations of the volcano several hours later. On May 7, 2004, the Autonomous Sciencecraft Experiment on EO-1 first demonstrated its ability to detect volcanic activity by sensing thermal emissions at Erebus. The larger image shows a true-color, photo-like view of the volcano, and the inset image shows thermal activity, highlighting the volcano’s molten lava lake. The larger image was acquired by the Advanced Land Imager (ALI), and the inset image was acquired by the Hyperion sensor. ![]() This image shows two views of Mount Erebus from February 6, 2009, captured by sensors on NASA’s Earth Observing-1 (EO-1) satellite. In 2004, the reliable presence of a lava lake at this volcano’s summit made Mount Erebus the perfect place to test a self-directed satellite and sensor. The world’s southernmost volcano to show activity during recorded history, Erebus holds a lava lake and occasionally experiences explosive eruptions. Antarctica’s Mount Erebus may be covered with glaciers, but they do little to cool the volcano’s molten core. ![]()
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