Wellington
New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern apologized on Thursday for the then-government’s handling of a plane crash in Antarctica 40 years ago that took the lives of 257 people in the country’s worst peacetime disaster. On 28 November 1979, Air New Zealand flight 901 was on a sightseeing tour from Auckland when it crashed into the side of Mount Erebus, a 3,794 meter (12,448 ft) volcano near the U.S. Antarctic research base of McMurdo Station. Most of the 237 passengers and 20 crew killed were New Zealanders but other nationalities included Americans, Canadians, Japanese and Australians. Originally the crash was blamed on the pilots, but following a public outcry, a Royal Commission of Inquiry was set up to investigate the disaster. It concluded the main cause of the accident was the state-owned airline’s actions in reprogramming the aircraft’s navigation system without advising the aircrew.
