Doomed to Fail - Ep 192: A Scenic Crash in Antarctica - Air New Zealand Flight 901

Episode Date: April 22, 2025

Join us for the sad tale of Air New Zealand's flight 901 that crashed in Antarctica in 1979. But first we need a little bit of context and we revisit several Doomed to Fail Episodes: The Franklin Expedition Ep 58Volcanoes - between 38 and 71Antarctica - Ep 158Mt. Everest - Ep 95 Then we get to the story of the trip, which sounds amazing until it isn't.  Join our Founders Club on Patreon to get ad-free episodes for life! patreon.com/DoomedtoFailPodWe would love to hear from you! Please follow along! Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/doomedtofailpod/  Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/doomedtofailpod  Youtube:  https://www.youtube.com/@doomedtofailpod TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@doomed.to.fail.pod Email: [e-mail] 

It's a matter of the people of the state of California versus Hortlandthal James Simpson, case number B.A.019. And so, my fellow Americans, ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country. Boom, and we're recording Taylor. Happy Spring to you. How are you? Good. I got the kids to watch Easter parade. It was their first time. Florence really liked it. It's one of my favorite movies, so. I don't know that movie. it's Judy Garland and Fred Astaire it's lovely

it's a classic 11 out of 10 recommend so it's great very cool so yeah we can go ahead and hop right in that was a bunny reference thank you that was lovely that was really great

that's a really great Easter thank you yeah hi welcome to June to fail we bring you history as most notorious disasters and failures twice a week I am Taylor joined by Fars Yes, I'm here, I'm here all the time This is me Fars

It is very springy I can like hear birds outside I do actually bunnies at my window Like several times a day It was like a bunny hopping by I wish it was spring all the time I don't know what the utility of the rest of the summer seasons are Hey great it's definitely nice

I like I liked On a crisp autumn But like spring And it also goes by so fast like it was just my husband's birthday last week and i remember when we lived in new york his birthday was always freezing and i always be like it's mid-april it has to be nice and it would never be nice you know um but it's really nice here we have some cactuses that bloom for like a day and then the you know then like the blooms that close up and become part of the cactus and they're

like bright pink it's really pretty are those pretty pears they're similar i'm sure they're probably related in some way okay fun yeah um we're both blessed to live in very cacti friendly environments so we are thank goodness for that um sweet taylor well let's dive in i think you're going to start us off today i am i have a one that ties a lot of the stuff we've been talking about over our million episodes together so i'm going to reference four of our episodes and tell you about a plane crush everything in one yes it is a a yes it's a yes it's a moose bouch It's not the right word. What's it called?

Like a tasting menu. Is it moj-bush? A real thing? Yeah. And a moose-bush is something that you eat between meals at a really fancy restaurant to cleanse your palate. So it's not a moose-bush at all. You know, usually like it comes in like a little plate. And then like you eat it and it's like, oh, my palate's cleansed.

It's like the ginger for sushi. Yes, exactly. Exactly. So I'm going to talk about Air New Zealand Flight 901. Does that ring any bells? No. Okay, good. So, I wrote not to be outdone in plane crashes.

Let's talk about. Also, because I just bought myself tickets to go to Atlanta, so I was psyching myself up because I have to go to Atlanta for two days for work. Soon? Yeah. All right. Getting psyched for it. So Air New Zealand Flight 901 crashed on November 29th, 1979.

But first, we have to talk about four things we've talked about before. The Franklin Expedition. which is episode 58, that is when they get lost in the Arctic, volcanoes, which are seven episodes in between episodes 38 and 71, they're in there. Antarctica, episode 158, you talked about how isolated Antarctica is and people who do their own surgery there because they can't get any help, and Mount Everest, which you talked about in episode 95. Fun. So all of that ties into this plane crash. So let's go back to 1845, and you'll remember the first of Franklin Expedition.

Yep. They set out from England to find that Northwest Passage, the two ships that are on Terror. Yeah, the Terror and the Arabis. Correct. Both those names are terrifying. And that's kind of what we're going to talk about. So they had tried to do this before and they'd gotten stuck in the ice for 10 months,

came back, went and did it again. This time, they did not make it. Everybody either starved or, you know, died of sickness. There was scurvy. They froze to death. there's evidence that they decided to, like, leave and start walking away, carrying a lot of their things that they had, but there was, like, lead leaking through their cans, and they were getting sick from blood poisoning. Everybody was kind of going crazy. Obviously, as you would,

I don't know how you could not go crazy. Right. And there's some, like, mummified bodies of sailors that we've seen from, from that expedition, but most of them are just gone. Eventually, in 2014 and 2016, the two ships were found, like their wreckage was found, but they were found 45 miles apart so at some point they were together in the ice and at some point the ice melted enough for them to separate and then they sank by that time everybody was dead

which is probably related to continental drift which is part of the volcano episodes yeah well yeah the election comes in there a second so all of that to say the terror was named because it was supposed to incite fear which makes sense it was used in the I think the war of 1812

it was used I think it was at the um in the terror is a ship that was in the bay in Baltimore more when the guy wrote the Star-Spangled Banner. Like, that ship has been everywhere. And the Erebus is its sister ship, and it was named after

a Greek deity that represents darkness born from chaos. So, like, don't name you about that. I would. That's so cool. It's very dark. And I feel like I... Oh, actually, okay. So remember that. I'm playing Pantera on that thing. That's fair. That's true. Like in Mad Max

with the guys, like, playing the guitar on like that thing. Yes, exactly. That makes sense. Instead of the mermaid, they have that guy just like strapped to the front of the, of the Aribus. So the Airbus is part of that fleet. It gets lost and everyone dies. Four years before that, in 1841, the same ship, the Aribus was captained by a man named James Clark Ross. So different captains, same two boats together.

But this time, they're in Antarctica. So they're at the South Pole of the Earth. and they discover in Antarctica two volcanoes. They name the volcanoes, the aribis, and the terror, after themselves. The arbus is an active, was actively erupting when he named it that. And that actually kind of does make sense. Yeah, yeah. That name actually is very fitting.

That is something to name an active volcano. Absolutely. And it is, so it's the same ship that named this volcano in Antarctica that ends up, you know, at the bottom of the ocean. in the Arctic on the other side of the world, which is pretty crazy. So the, so Nilemon Aris is in Antarctica. It's kind of on the, near the coast. It's obviously been there for, you know, a long time. It is the southern most active volcano on Earth.

It is the second highest volcano in Antarctica. The other one is dormant. And it is a polygenetic stratovolcano. So, which means it has ice caves and active lava. So it's like a pretty intense. mountain. They should make a movie in there. I know. It sounds wild. I was actually thinking of

like Lenny Briefenstall in a cave on a mountain making a movie because you're like, there are active ice cliffs here. I was actually thinking about another episode that I, well, there was the one that I covered where Superman's father played by

Martin Blander, they should have done in that cave. With the suitcase. With the suitcase. Yes. So it was first the island around the volcano was first mapped in 1912 it is close to Ross Island which obviously Captain Ross named after himself and other Antarctic stations from like different countries around here and I think we talked about this in your Antarctica episode but like it's a terrible place to be it's a coldest place on earth it's also a desert so

there's like no vegetation there's no animals sometimes it's you know light all the time sometimes it's dark all the time. It's just, like, not a good place to be. You're there for, like, scientific exploration for, like, six months, and then you leave and you have to come back later. It's, like, space. Yeah, they also, the thing I cover was catabolic winds, which are, like, these insanely powerful winds that prevent anybody from actually getting

to you once you're there. Yes. It's scary. So, that's what we have. So now we have an active volcano in Antarctica, named the Aribus, named after the boat. we knew about from the other thing which is an interesting connection yeah okay now let's talk about mount everest so you talked about people who died climbing mont Everest in like some bodies

well yeah i think i think i covered um i mean this we've done a lot of this so that they're going back in memory bank here i think it was all the different corpses that are visible yes yes yes so you mentioned in that episode that some people people like George Mallory and Andrew Irvine tried to get to the top before. And I think one of them, their bodies had something that, like, they didn't have a letter that they were going to leave at the top, which makes you think that they did actually make it. Yep. Is that right? Yep.

Yep. So, you know, we think other people might have never before, but the first person to actually do it that came back is Edmund Hillary and Tenzig Norgay, who was his short-up guide from Nepal. So Sir Edmund Hillary, we talked about a little bit in your episode. He was from New Zealand, which. was part of the UK, just a little bit of stuff on New Zealand that I didn't like super fast New Zealand information. In 1840, it was a British colony. In 1907, it had its own dominion, so it could self-govern, but the British Empire was still head of state. And then in 1947, there was a statute of Westminster, which gave New Zealand full legislative independence from Britain. It could make its own laws. And then in 1986, it was a Constitution Act where it has

its own constitutional independence but that means the queen is also instead of them kind of like reporting to the queen of england they just changed her title to queen of new zealand when she's there essentially so king charles is king of england plus 14 other things including new zealand i mean it sounds like a lot but i i assume it's just all ceremonial yeah so that's what that's just what new zealand's up to anyway edmund hillary was born on july 20th 1919 he was six feet six inches tall and he looked like it he looks huge very skinny he was a beekeeper and an avid like mountain climber and then he joined the war in world war two in the pacific theater but religiously he was a pacifist and he didn't want to join but ended up joining after he felt like he had to in 1953 he climbed out Everest and it was the queen's coronation day do you remember that how exciting that was yeah yeah totally i remember that all the time i think about it constantly i think you i feel you talked about it i thought that's why i mentioned it i probably saw it somewhere in pascom Anyway, that was exciting for the empire that he had done that, and he was, like, from there.

And he was knighted shortly after, which is why he's Sir Edmund Hillary. So he kept climbing after this. He also did a lot of humanitarian work. He helped build schools and bridges and hospitals in Nepal, air strips to make a little bit safer to fly in and out of Nepal. He wanted to help the Sherpas who had helped him. Have you seen pictures of the airstrip he helped build? I think so. They're really insane, right?

It is. it's so much worse than just dying I would just tell the apologies fly the thing straight to the fucking side of the mountain because it is

yeah I know we talked about this in front of land on that thing mm-hmm mm-hmm it's like like part of the most

dangerous part of doing that is that yes yeah yeah well God bless him for having done it like I mean

yeah yeah yeah yeah but still it is a horribly terrifying experience exactly

so he does a lot of humanitarian work and he also does stuff in Antarctica so he led the New Zealand section of the Commonwealth Trans-Antarctic Expedition

in 1957. So he was one of the first people to reach the South Pole by car. He drove there. He was the first person to stand at both the North and South Poles and the top of Mount Everest. And I can't feel like that can't be a long list. Yeah, very very accomplished, clearly. Yeah. And so in 1975, so he had, he was married to a woman named Louise and they had three children. And then in 1975, when his wife and his daughter Belinda were visiting him in Nepal,

their plane did crash shortly after takeoff in Nepal, and they both died. So he was left with his two boys who, I think he's a girl and a boy, and they're still alive, his kids are still alive today. But he was obviously super devastated about this and, like, spent some time alone, and then went back to his, like, humanitarian work after his wife had passed. So it's the 1970s. And now we know that.

So we know that Sir Edmund Hillary is doing stuff. in New Zealand and Antarctica and all of that. He's getting older. He exists. So now, I'm going to start the story of this actual of New Zealand and New Zealand flight 901, knowing all the stuff that we know. Sweet. Those are a hell to set up.

Yep. So in 1979 and before this, there was a trip you could take with Air New Zealand that honestly sounds awesome. So it's a sightseeing flight. You leave Auckland and you go. go to Antarctica, you go down by Ross Island, which was named by our Captain Ross, and you stop and refuel, and then you fly around the part of the Antarctic. It is a 10 to 12-hour flight, and on the flight, it's open bar, there's lots of meals, they play movies that are related to exploration,

and it's at about 15% under capacity, so there's space to walk around and look around. So maybe be like you and your friend share a three-person rope. There's never a third person. You just like walk around, eat, drink, have a great time. Look at the snow at the window, but you're warm and cozy inside this plane. And it has an expert that tells you what you're looking at. And guess who that expert was for a lot of the flights? Tensig Norgay.

No, it was Sir Edmund Hillary himself. Yeah, right, right. I don't know why I said, sorry. Could have been, it turns and could have done it too. But Sir Edmund Hillary would be on there, which would be. How cool would that be to be on a plane looking at the Arctic and having Edmund Hillary tell you about it? This does sound incredible. I think it sounds really fun.

But on this day, November 29th, 1979, Sir Edmund Hillary couldn't make it. He had other obligations. Wait, so it was really him. It wasn't like an audio recording or something? No, he was really him. It was a human. He was there. And he would like tell you what was going on.

That's so great. That is ten times cooler than what I thought it was. Yeah. no he was like literally there you could like ask him questions and he would show you and he like knew what you were flying over and he would talk about all of his adventures and i mean wow awesome um so he couldn't make it that day so he asked his friend peter mulgrew to do it instead so peter was born on november 21st 1927 in new zealand he was in the royal new zealand navy for 11 years including being active in the korean war he joined a Himalayan expedition in 1960, where he suffered severe frostbite and lost both of his feet. But he kept climbing. And he kept doing adventure his stuff. And he climbed the Matterhorn later. He

was a sailor. He sailed around Cape Horn in 1973. So he's very qualified and very brave, obviously, because he had his feet imputed. Peter's married to a woman named June, and they have two children. so he says oh he also was on boards with sir ibn hillary they worked together for like their humanitarian stuff as well so they're really good friends and he says okay i got this like he's like it's only been it's been like four years since sir i've been hillary's wife and daughter died so i feel like it just hasn't been that long since that and he's like i'll go and i'll do this trip for you so peter mulgrew is the um is the expert on this flight and because it's

November, the end of November, a lot of the people who are on the flight are there because it's their Christmas gift from their family. Like, we saved up money for you to go on this trip. A lot of older couples. The pilots are there. The pilots had never done this flight before, but they were very qualified pilots. The captain was Jim Collins. He was 45. The first officer, Greg Casson, was in his 30s. There were two flight engineers. There was a first officer. So there were a lot of people on the flight that could very successfully fly an airplane. That day, there were 257 people on board, 237 passengers, and 20 crew members. So a lot of people. It was also a McDonald-Douglas DC-10, and you'll remember that things don't go great with those a couple

times. That's a tri-star, right? I'm not sure. I know that it's the one where I can't remember we talked about it but where like the cargo door didn't close all the way in some cases and that caused crashes yeah i can see how that would work i think it is i think it's the one that has the three things oh yeah yeah maybe um so the flight board's at 830 a m and the first four hours are fine around noon there was regular communication and around 1249 communication ceased and they never heard from the plane again. So here's the part that is so crazy that I want, I will have, don't look at it up now,

but look at it up later. I don't know if you've been Googling this while I've been talking. But there is actual video from onboard the plane of the crash itself. It is about a minute long. It was found in the wreckage. So it's also helped to verify the video because people recognize their family members on the video. So it's a minute, it's very clearly on like a 70s style like recorder that you're holding. And there are people walking around with cocktails and talking to each other and laughing and

looking out the window and taking pictures and eating. And you can see what it would be like to like be on the sightseeing plane. They're walking around and looking at it. And then the camera turns and looks out of the window and you're looking. You can see the outline of the window and you're looking at like the snow and ice. And then all of a sudden you just see orange engulf the window and then it's over. So it was like the actual playing crash moment. Jeez.

Well, so it was the, it was, I guess, the thing blew up or? I'll tell you what happened. Okay. So it happened very, very fast because you can see like someone's like out the window, you know, taking this thing and then all of a sudden, orange. So by 9 p.m., New Zealand was finally like, it's lost. Like we need to send out a search party. At midnight, a U.S. team that was joining the search, saw the record. around Mount Airbus.

And I was like, how could they have seen that? But it was always daytime at the time of the year. So that's how they were able to do search at midnight. So what they ended up doing is sending people, like you said, to go out and camp and find the wreckage and go through it and find and identify the bodies and do all of that. But that was also really, really hard because of the wind

because of like the weather there. It was freezing. And so they did their best. but the wreckage of the flight is actually still there in Antarctica, and here's what happened. So the night before the flight, the coordinates of the path were changed slightly

by two degrees longitude, and that the crew was not informed. And then 14 months before this, the flight path had been digitized, and when it was digitized, it was another change in, like, the latitude was changed from 164 to 166 in one place. So I'm not like,

a map person but that little change was like kind of annoying and another pilot had complained and reported it but they didn't do anything about it so like that little change kind of made the path like a little bit harder to navigate but they were like don't worry about it no big deal but then that change combined with the two degree change that they had made the night before and not told them about put them on a wildly different path so the pilots thought that they were flying down the McMurdo Sound, which is a clear path over, like over the snow and ice where you can go and like do this sightseeing trip. And they descended about 2,000 feet to get a better look for the passengers, which they had never done before because they had never flown this route. But like all the flights that had done in the past, they had done that. Like it was not new. The pilots would lower the flights that you could, you could see, you could see better. But what they didn't know is they were not at all where they thought they were. They were at actually headed straight towards Mount Airbus, and they couldn't see it because it was a total white out.

So it was like white sky, white ground, white mountain, they couldn't see it. And they thought they were on the mountain? They flew into the mountain and exploded. Wow. They flew into the side of the mountain, just like the one that you talked about last week. Wow. And they, it would have been a total surprise because they literally just did not see it. You couldn't tell where the horizon was.

You couldn't tell where anything was because it was just totally white. So it's called sector whiteout, which makes it, like, impossible to tell where the train is and where it isn't. Everyone died, obviously. You know, everyone on the plane died. Air New Zealand blamed the pilots immediately. They said it's their fault. They're the ones who did this. And the pilot's families and people were like, they wouldn't, like, that doesn't make any sense.

They were very accomplished pilots. they were following the flight path. They ended up getting, you know, finally getting, like, the data back. And they did at, like, one, a couple seconds before the crash, they would get it, they got a warning. And it was, like, at 1249, they got a warning that was like, pull up, pull up, pull up. And the flight engineer said, we're at 500 feet. And they're like, pull up, pull up. And then that was it.

So it was like half a second warning that ended up getting from their, from their, like, equipment anyway. So they didn't know that they were flying into it. They basically, they did fly low. Basically, they thought there was somewhere else. So finally, there was an inquest in 1980, and Judge Peter Mahon in New Zealand blamed Air New Zealand for it and the government. He said the investigation was he said litany twice. There was a litany of administrative blunders and an orchestrated litany of lies. People were just trying to cover it up and cover it up and blame the pilots, but it wasn't the pilot's fault.

the DC-10 plane is the same plane that crashed in Chicago and then like in Turkey as well so it's like a plane that like was not I think it might have been the Tenerife plane as well it had been a DC-10 could have been I know that one of them was a 747 the one that actually started the whole problem was a KLM 747 because he took off without ground clearance yeah yeah yeah but finally in 30 years later New Zealand they apologized for the disaster, saying that they, you know, that they should have done, like, a better, a better job of, you know, taking care of it afterwards, of all those things. That was, he, he apologized, everyone affected. And then the same judge, Mahone, he awarded a memorial medal to the pilots, just like for their, like, it wasn't their fault. They did all of those things. and then the like I said the wreckage is still there they left you left all of it there because like the one in the indies like you just can't go and get it like a lot of it is still there some of the bodies were never identified some of them some of them were and then many years later how many years later so I think 10 years later in night yes in 1989 Sir Edmund Hillary married Peter Mulgrew's widow June

and they spent the rest of their lives together gotta make sense yeah she definitely has a type I know and they they continue to do humanitarian work around around Nepal and to help the people who live in like those those towns

at the bottom of those of those big mountains and they were together until they both passed away June passed away last year in 2024 no way isn't it crazy how recent all this stuff was Yeah. Like we just discovered.

And I guess when did he do it like 1950s when he summited? Yeah. I think I remember when we talked about this before. Like I always pictured that happening like 100 years before that. I know. When you said 1919 and when he was born, I was like, I think you mean like 1719. No, I know. He feels like a much older thing.

But no, he's like pretty new. Pretty new. But yeah, isn't that crazy? That is pretty crazy. Yeah. That is a, you know what? It's a shame because that flight. It does sound really, really cool.

Doesn't it? I think it sounds super cool. Okay, did you find the video? No. Let me send it to you. It's like, oh, that's a commercial. It is only, it's less than a minute. Obviously, I'll put it in our show notes for everyone, but it looks really pretty.

You can see that I'll narrate it. They're looking at the ocean. They're taking, they're drinking cocktails. Everyone's got cool sunglasses on. That looks so fun. There's this lady. It's cool seven-year-old's haircut. I know.

I got these cool cameras. And then they look, oh, look, it's so pretty. I can see these mountains. Look, it's pretty mountains. I can see the wing of the plane. Oh, orange. That was at 49.50. That is freaky.

Well, the one good thing I would say is if you're going to go, you know, like, at least you did something that was really fun really cool and it was a last thing you remember and it was immediate yeah exactly so um wow way to way to dovetail a bunch of different stuff

into one I know it was not fun I think we learned a bunch of cool stuff and I could have not known like the where the word arabas came from but now we know yeah yeah um well I bet I bet Edmund Hillary was like, man, thank God I didn't take that one.

I bet he felt terrible. Oh, my God. I know, I know. Actually, everything I've read about him, he sounds like he's actually a really good person, and he probably did. He does. He seems really nice. Like, I was reading his Wikipedia page, and just someone was saying after he climbed on Everest, he looked like a, like a happy walking skeleton because he was just like so tall,

but like skinny from all of the working out and like climbing the mountain and just like, it's having fun. Yeah, he seems. seems very nice very fun thanks for sharing yet another plane disaster which i never knew happened um for some reason the fact that it was a just a fun little tourism thing makes it seem even scarier i don't know why i i don't know i feel like i but i also feel like i well a couple things i never thought about being on a plane to sightsee that sounds kind of fun yeah i mean I would totally do that.

Yeah. You do what, I mean, there's times when I get my car and just drive because I'm like, I don't know, I just want to drive. I just want to, like, drive around and see what's going on in this neighborhood or whatever. So, like, why would show the plane if you have one? Yeah. So. I also feel like I don't really understand what, where Antarctica is. I want to do Antarctica to Auckland.

If I want to look at on a map. Yeah. When you said that, I was like, I don't know my geography well enough to. understand this okay I see Auckland then I want to do I'm not nervous well I don't want directions Google Maps when I see how I can ride my bike I just want to see how far away it is oh yeah so it's like it's like very very close it's like you don't go over Antarctica you're kind of like right where you first get there you know right yeah because why would you want to go over it right you can't really

yeah yeah the landmass is huge and i'm looking at this on a map it's it's like at least half the size of south america i know how big wait okay i'm asking so many stupid questions what is the land of my darker size 5.275 million square miles The world's The world's highest, dryest, windy as coldest and icy as continent Continent Yeah

Oh, I guess it says The United States could fit on it, it says It would fit in it, right? Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Actually, like, United States and Australia, almost in Europe, almost all fit exactly inside of it.

Okay, well, that's still huge. Yeah, it's huge. Yeah, so imagine all this stuff that we haven't discovered in Antarctica because we can't get in the middle of it. I know. I was talking to my nail lady. I forget you're talking about. She was like, you know what I hate? Whenever I'm on the news, they're like, oh, I got this like parasite that I drilled out of a hole in the Arctic.

And she's like, put that back. I'm like, you're totally right. I need to watch, what was the name of it? The Body Sand. The Body Snash movie? What was that? They found the dead thing in Antarctica. They thought it and then, like, everybody was infected.

So many. It happens many times. sweet well thank you for sharing taylor very very fun you're welcome do you have any fun listener mail to read us off with i have a good amount of suggestions that i've been coming in i got one from morgan i got a couple from kara i got one from lindsay um i got an email from justin so um thank you everyone yeah please keep writing in write to us at dunefelpod at gmail.com and find us on the socials at dupel pod yeah patreon on, every social place, and yeah, that's where we're, that's where we'll be.

Sweet. May it be else? That's it. Thank you. We'll go ahead and sign off.