Recovery operation - Erebus disaster

Operation Overdue

By 9.30 p.m. Flight TE901 was officially out of fuel. Air New Zealand informed the press that it believed the aircraft was lost. Rescue teams searching along the assumed flight path had found nothing. At 12.55 a.m. on 29 November a United States Navy plane reported from Mt Erebus: ‘Debris at crash site being blown by the wind. No apparent survivors.’

A team of New Zealand Police officers and a Mountain Face Rescue Team were immediately dispatched and arrived at the scene 20 hours after the accident. Their worst fears were confirmed. Nobody had survived the impact. The aircraft's altitude at the time of the collision was 445 metres.

The purpose of Operation Overdue was to recover and identify the remains, which were spread over a wide area of the mountain. The extraordinary conditions in Antarctica posed real safety concerns for the personnel involved in this mission. The possibility of leaving the bodies where they lay rather than risking more lives was dismissed. This was partly due to strong pressure from the Japanese government as 24 Japanese tourists were among the dead.

The effort to recover bodies and evidence to help determine the cause of the crash was traumatic and painstaking. As many as 60 recovery workers were on site at a time. This work was physically demanding and mentally harrowing. Operation Overdue continued until 9 December 1979.

The successful conduct of this operation was due in part to the recent establishment of a Disaster Victim Identification (DVI) team. New Zealand’s police commissioner, Bob Walton, had recently attended a conference in Australia where the response of New South Wales Police to the 1977 Glanville railway disaster (which killed 83 people) was discussed. The New South Wales Police had subsequently created a specialist DVI team, prompting Walton to do the same on his return. The Erebus disaster occurred only a few weeks later – the very day before this team was due to hold a refresher course. In all, 133 police personnel worked at the recovery site or in other areas, including the Auckland-based mortuary.