Ian Hambly remembers the Erebus disaster

Please note that this page includes descriptions of the Erebus recovery operation that may be distressing for some readers.

Between 1973 and 1983, Ian Hambly worked as an Air New Zealand flight steward. During this time, he flew on DC8s as well as DC10s and later 200 series 747s. Ian recounts his most memorable flight as 15 November 1977 when he crewed on a ‘sight seeing’ trip to Antarctica. ‘It was my best day with Air New Zealand.’

The return flight from Auckland to Antarctica, with a refuel in Christchurch on the homeward leg, took over 12 hours. The pilot in command was Gordon Vette and the commentator was Peter Mulgrew. That flight gave me a good understanding of what was to happen later.

I was elected, in a by-election, to the 12-person executive of the Airline Stewards & Hostesses Union in October 1979. In June 1980 I was elected vice-president and in June 1981 I was elected president. I was re-elected president in June 1982 and again in June 1983.

Appointment as coordinator of company response to cabin crew following the Erebus accident

On 28 November 1979 I started six weeks’ of annual leave. I was phoned around 3 p.m. by a fellow crew member who told me that a DC10 was missing on an Antarctic flight. I stayed listening to the radio throughout the period when it was predicted to have run out of fuel and until the discovery of the wreckage on Mt Erebus later that day.

At 9 a.m. the following morning, 29 November, the Union’s executive members in Auckland met at the Union office. We then went into the city to meet cabin services management. As I had just started leave and had no duty requirements, it was agreed by both parties that I would coordinate the activities relating to the families of the 15 cabin crew on board. I was appointed as a cabin services representative on the committee the airline was forming to gather all relevant information. This committee was chaired by the company’s safety manager, George Oldfield.

I attended a meeting of this committee when Air New Zealand’s Chief Pilot Ian Gemmell joined it. He had just returned from Antarctica. I am unsure of the date. He appeared only briefly (for no more than five minutes) and made the comment ‘there are problems in the navigation section’ before leaving. He certainly did not leave the meeting and return. He made no mention of changed coordinates and did not identify what the problems were. I did not attend any more meetings of the committee.

Working at the mortuary

Shortly afterwards I went to the University Medical School mortuary, opposite the Public Hospital. I went there on the first day of its operation and attended every day for the next six weeks until the operation closed. My task was to locate the crew amongst the remains recovered from the crash site. I knew all the crew on board, both flight deck and cabin crew. The police were initially overwhelmed by the situation and made the unusual request that I perform all the formal identifications of the cabin crew, where visual identification was possible. I obtained permission from all their next of kin to do so. I was able to identify nine of the 15 cabin crew. The reason I stayed until the last day was that the body of one hostess (Diane Keenan), was not found. At the end all unidentified body parts were placed in 16 coffins and I observed that process. These coffins were later interred at Waikumete Cemetery on 12 February 1980, with a commemorative plaque giving the names of the 44 unidentified victims.

I was given the unique chance to perform this service for my fellow crew members by an old friend, Nick Anderson. He and I had joined the Police together in 1963. In the immediate aftermath of the accident there was a lot of confusion as to what was happening. At one stage I was told I was going to Antarctica and then I was not. I rang Nick, now a senior sergeant in the Auckland Police, to see if he had any knowledge. He told me that he was going to a meeting that afternoon with the Auckland Coroner, Allan Copeland, and suggested I join him.

At that meeting, which I gate-crashed, a debate took place as to what should be done with the bodies of the passengers and crew. The Police advised that they had been in touch with Interpol and the advice they had related to a major aircraft accident in Tenerife in March 1977 when two passenger jets collided on the runway with the loss of 583 lives. The Spanish authorities had cut the lower jawbones off victims for dental examination and buried the rest in a mass grave. I remember Allan Copeland saying, ‘We won’t be doing that here’. It was suggested, because of the remoteness of the crash location, that the bodies be left on site. Another suggestion was retrieving the bodies and taking them to Christchurch as the nearest [landing] place [for flights from Antarctica] in New Zealand.

In the end the decision was made to bring the bodies to Auckland, principally because the Auckland Medical School building had just been completed. Its mortuary had been designed to cope with up to 500 bodies in the event of a major catastrophe, e.g., an earthquake or volcanic eruption. A second consideration was that Air New Zealand’s head office was in Auckland. A major cargo operation would be required to return bodies to both national and overseas destinations.

Nick Anderson was appointed officer in charge of the mortuary operation. He gave me full assistance to help speed up the release of the flight crew. As it turned out, the Auckland mortuary could not cope with the 257 people on the Erebus flight. There was not enough refrigeration for holding bodies for any length of time.

Initially the RNZAF flew the recovered remains to Whenuapai and began sending them in military ambulances to the mortuary in Grafton. At that time the Northwestern Motorway finished at Newton Rd and the procession of ambulances along Karangahape Rd and across Grafton Bridge was cause for public grief.

I recall there was difficulty finding adequate human resources – pathologists, dentists, etc., for forensic examination – and police. Considerable resource was used in locating passenger cars at the airport (and the keys for them were with the passengers on the flight), locating the motels/hotels that those from overseas and the rest of New Zealand were staying in (and retrieving their possessions for shipment home). They also had to obtain details of clothing, jewellery, watches, tattoos, dental and medical records, etc., to assist with identification. It was a massive undertaking.

It was decided to hire a refrigerated truck which was stationed at Whenuapai. After the arrival of Hercules aircraft from Antarctica, the remains on board were loaded into this truck and driven to the mortuary where it was backed up to the entrance doors. Each day I stationed myself at the rear of the truck and inspected all the remains as they were unloaded. The mortuary and identification teams could handle about 15 bodies per day. Once I located a crew member, the police and the rest of the identification team gave special attention to aid speedy release.

Early in the operation, the two first officers had been wrongly identified. Broken cheek bones, etc., can easily transform one’s appearance. The person making the initial identification had no experience of such things. The Coroner immediately realised that visual identification on its own was not sufficient and ruled that it must be supported by dental or other means (jewellery, documents, fingerprints, etc.). DNA evidence was not available at that time.

The first body to be released from the mortuary was that of Jim Lewis, a cabin crew member, followed shortly thereafter by all the flight deck crew. I also found Peter Mulgrew and was able to advise his brother Ken, who at the time was a first officer with Air New Zealand. The bodies of 14 of the 15 cabin crew were returned to their families, as well as all five of the flight deck crew.

The New Zealand Police must be congratulated for its professionalism in performing this most difficult of tasks. The Police realised that Interpol had no proper resource for handling aircraft accidents and engaged the National Film Unit to record every aspect of the operation – the things the officers did well and the things they did not. It was later made into a film that was sent to Interpol for distribution to other police forces faced with aircraft accidents.

After I started work at the mortuary, I could not watch TV or read the newspapers in case the Erebus crash was mentioned. The job I had to perform was so difficult to return to each day that the only way I could cope was to ask my wife to put a meal in front of me and leave me alone. I placed a very onerous burden on my wife and children for those six weeks. In my eight years serving with the Police prior to joining Air New Zealand, I had attended situations involving death and had had to respond to events where life and death decisions had to be quickly made. Always with death is the requirement to assist those around the deceased. Nothing could prepare one for the scale of Erebus.

At the end of the mortuary operation, it was accepted that 213 bodies had been identified, although I note that now the figure of 214 is sometimes quoted. I see that a Japanese passenger’s name has been erased from the plaque at Waikumete. I am unaware of why this is. In any event it was a fantastic achievement from such an isolated and desolate location. The crash remains New Zealand’s worst non-military disaster. The toll of 257 people killed is one more than that of the Napier earthquake of 1931.

It was a major concern to the wider Air New Zealand cabin crew fraternity that someone may have survived the crash. Our whole role is based on coping with emergency situations. In my time in the Police before joining Air New Zealand, I had attended many motor accidents where people had escaped without a scratch from the most devastating of wrecks. I spoke to Frank Cairns, the chief pathologist at the mortuary, about this. He advised me that post-mortems had shown that no one had survived the impact. Even with bodies that externally appeared to have not been injured, internal damage was severe. Most internal organs were ruptured. An exacerbating feature was that, apart from the flight crew, most people had been standing up looking out the windows. Not many were over the wing where there was a fire. The aircraft was of course pressurised and as it hit the ground, some people were ejected for considerable distances from the aircraft. The Police gave me a grid of the crash site with the coordinates for each piece of human remains recovered located on it. I marked the coordinates for all the crew. I lent it to Ken Hickson, a journalist, when he wrote his book Flight 901 to Erebus (but he failed to return it). Frank Cairns also told me that nerve impulses travel in the body at around 70 mph. As the aircraft was travelling at over 300 mph at the time of the impact, nobody felt a thing. Death was instantaneous in every case.

Return of property

While I was at the mortuary a wooden crate was delivered from Antarctica, containing crew property. The crate was opened in my presence by Sergeant Gary Whittle, who had been a constable I had served with at Newmarket in 1965. I personally delivered all the cabin crew property to the respective families. I found it to be the most harrowing of the tasks I had to perform during that time. I also received property for the flight deck crew and signed for it. I personally returned a camera belonging to Flight Engineer Gordon Brooks to his wife Margaret, whom I knew as she had previously been an Air New Zealand hostess. All of the other belongings of the flight crew I gave to Bruce Crosbie, a New Zealand Air Line Pilots' Association representative, for return to their next of kin.

I specifically recall seeing the black flight bag belonging to Captain Jim Collins. It had his name in gold lettering on it. It was the type of bag that many crew bought for a good price in Hong Kong. The bag was undamaged. I looked into it and saw a toilet bag, a pair of running shoes, a pair of underpants and a pressed folded white shirt. I have the most vivid memory of this. I am aware that Sergeant Greg Gilpin, who saw the bag at the crash site, said that when he saw it there was nothing in it, but I remain convinced that my recollection is right. I also signed for two diaries belonging to Jim Collins. The flight bag did not appear on the list of property I signed for.

About a week later Bruce Crosbie rang me to say that one of the diaries I had given him did not belong to Jim Collins. He had checked the flights in it with crew control and found that they coincided with the flights undertaken by Dianne Keenan, the only crew member not found. He gave me the diary and I returned it to Dianne’s parents. They were relieved to have some memento of their only daughter. The diary had obviously been quite close to a fire. The cover was singed around the edges and the diary smelt strongly of aviation gas. It was, however, quite readable. I noticed, but paid no attention to, the fact that the top right corner of the fly leaf had been ripped off. It became apparent later that that’s where her name had been.

There is no doubt I remain affected by my experience in the mortuary. For seven years I went to Waikumete Cemetery on the anniversary of the crash to reflect. I still go there occasionally and regularly visit the crew memorial site established at Auckland Airport. I was last there on 28 November 2012, the 33rd anniversary. One other crew member had left flowers and a poignant note. I consider myself lucky that I was able to serve my fellow crew members. Everyone wanted to do what they could to help, and I was fortunate to be able to use my prior experience in an appropriate way.

I have set out to recount the small part I played in New Zealand’s worst disaster. I do it for:

Captain Jim Collins
First officers Greg Cassin and Graham Lucas
Flight engineers Gordon Brooks and Nick Moloney
Chief purser Roy McPherson
Pursers Martin Collins and Russell Scott
Assistant pursers Dave Bennett and Mike Finlay
Senior cabin crew Graham Cater, Sue Marinovic and Bruce Maxwell
Cabin crew Elizabeth Carr-Smith, Dianne Keenan, Jim Lewis, Katrina Morrison, Dave Sicklemore, Steve Simmons and Marie Wolfert.
And for Peter Mulgrew.