Pre-war and Wartime Accidents

Air losses in New Zealand have followed the general pattern of those of most countries in the apprentice days of aviation, but major disasters on regular passenger-service routes have been mercifully few in the three to four decades since the establishment of this form of inland communication. Only three large airliners have been lost, but in each case the casualty rate was 100 per cent. Smaller craft have a less enviable record and the fate of some is still unknown. There is the case of Moncrieff and Hood, whose aeroplane, heard over the North Island at the end of a pioneering flight across the Tasman Sea in January 1928, has never been discovered. Then also, aerial topdressing, a recent New Zealand development for the improvement of pastoral high country, is unfortunately accompanied by a loss of life and machines.

Wartime air accidents, especially those concerned with training, were not infrequent, but at the time, from considerations of security, there was little public knowledge of some distressing occurrences. For instance, on 9 June 1942, the explosive crash of an American Flying Fortress, shortly after taking off from Whenuapai at midnight, awoke half the sleeping population of suburban Auckland, but it was over a year before an official announcement was made to the effect that that night 11 visiting airmen had lost their lives. Similarly, when a Liberator bomber a year later came to grief on the fringe of the same airfield, the public were not told until many months later that 14 out of a total complement of 16 airmen had been killed. On 21 August 1944 two of a flight of seven Lockheed Hudson bombers of the reconnaissance section of the Royal New Zealand Air Force, with 14 men on board, were lost off the coast of New Zealand on a service flight from Fiji to Auckland. They disappeared when they protectively broke formation in thick weather and were never seen again.

The first civilian casualty list associated with regular passenger air services occurred on 7 May 1942 when a Wellington-Nelson aircraft with a crew of two and three passengers struck a rock face 5,000 ft up on Mt. Richmond in the Nelson district in murky weather. The plane was found burnt out. There were no survivors. And then later in the same year, on 21 December 1942, an Air Travel Ltd. De Havilland Dragonfly, bound for Nelson from Westport, plunged into the sea. The pilot was rescued by a passing collier, but the four passengers were drowned.

The “Kaka” and “Kereru” Crashes

The first major passenger-plane crash with fatal results in the then nearly 20 years of commercial flying in New Zealand occurred on 23 October 1948, when the Lockheed Electra airliner Kaka, operated by the State-owned National Airways Corporation, went missing on a routine flight from Palmerston North to Hamilton. Less than half an hour after take-off, the Kaka literally disappeared from sight and sound, and it was nearly seven days, after an intensive air and land search over 450 square miles of rugged country, before the wrecked fuselage was discovered half-buried in the snow 3,000 ft up on the slopes of Mt. Ruapehu. All 13 occupants of the plane had perished. In the disintegrated debris of the machine was found the air-speed indicator which, jammed at a reading of 150 m.p.h., furnished some evidence of the terrific force of the impact when the plane struck the mountainside. A Court of Inquiry found that the Kaka was off course at the time of accident, due to an error in the pilot's calculations.

In the following year, on 18 March 1949, another National Airways passenger liner, the Kereru, a Lodestar aircraft with 15 persons on board, smashed into the Tararua foothills near Waikanae, at an altitude of 1,500 ft, and burst into flames on impact. There were no survivors. The Kereru was on a trunk flight from Auckland to Dunedin and crashed into the hillside a few minutes after receiving its landing instructions from the control tower at the Paraparaumu airport, 13 miles away. At the time of the accident the pilot was flying under visual flight rules, for which he had authority, due to a very low cloud base. Wreckage was sighted two hours after the Kereru had been posted overdue, but this turned out to be the remains of an Air Force Ventura lost three years before on a training flight. Shortly afterwards, however, searching aircraft sighted burning debris on the wooded hillside east of Waikanae, and not far from the Otaki River mouth. This was the remains of the Kereru, and when a rescue party reached the scene after a hazardous trek through the bush, they found parts of the burnt-out plane spread over a wide area. In the view of the Royal Commission of Inquiry the tragedy was the result of faulty navigation.

Recent Ruapehu Crashes

Mount Ruapehu claimed another 10 lives in the years that followed. On 4 December 1951 a Royal New Zealand Air Force plane flying from Ohakea base to Rukuhia in the Waikato struck the western slopes of the mountain in murky weather and all four occupants of the machine were killed.

There was a more poignant angle to the 1961 tragedy on Mt. Ruapehu. Six people died when a Bay of Plenty Airways Aero-Commander passenger plane crashed into the eastern side of the snowcovered mountain on 21 November 1961. The plane carried a pilot and five passengers. Among them were a young wife and her two infant children who were returning to Murupara after a reunion weekend with a Lower Hutt family with whom they had travelled from England as emigrants only months before. The other two passenger casualties were adults, and the pilot, who also lost his life, was the founder and managing director of the airline. The Civil Aviation expert who inspected the wreck found that the crash appeared to have been caused by sudden turbulence over the mountain. This aggravated a fatigue crack that had developed in a wing spar. The crack progressed into an immediate fracture which so weakened the wing that it sheared off from the fuselage. The plane struck the mountainside at 7,500 ft, bringing Mt. Ruapehu's toll in aircraft crashes to 21 in 14 years.

“Dragonfly” Disappearance, 1962

At 9.52 a.m. on 12 February 1962, a 26-year-old “Dragonfly” aircraft belonging to Air Charter (New Zealand) Ltd. left Christchurch for a scenic flight over the Milford Sound—Fiordland area, where weather conditions were uncertain. Besides the pilot the aircraft was carrying four passengers, including a young newly married couple. No trace of the plane or its occupants has ever been found. During the search 34 planes flew nearly 400 hours in 167 sorties and covered an area of 17,000 sq. miles.

Although no cause for the disappearance could be established, the official inquiry drew attention to shortcomings in the plane's maintenance and, also, to its being overloaded.

The Kaimai Crash

On 3 July 1963 a National Airways Dakota DC3 went missing in a storm which it encountered while flying on the first leg of a routine passenger trip from Auckland, via Tauranga, Gisborne, and Palmerston North, to Wellington. It was thought that the crash had occurred in the Kaimai Ranges in the vicinity of the small settlement of Gordon, but deteriorating weather conditions prevented rescue operations. At 11.30 a.m. on 4 July one of the ground parties saw wreckage on a 2,400 ft bush-covered ridge of Mount Ngatamahinerua (2,787 ft). This information was quickly checked by helicopter and a ground party at once set out from Gordon. They found the plane completely burned out and the 22 passengers and three crew members dead. This is the worst air accident in the history of civil or military aviation in New Zealand. The remains of the aircraft were covered over by an Army party on 2 May 1964.

Recent Air Accidents

Unfortunately the first three months of 1965 have to date (April 1965) been the worst on record for air accidents. These included a number of topdressing crashes as well as the loss of a Cessna 180 which on 4 March crashed on Lake Shirley near the head of Caswell Sound, Fiordland, with the death of the pilot and one passenger, followed on 12 March by the crash of another Cessna 180 on the north-east face of Mt. Talbot, Fiordland, with four deaths.

by Ronald Jones, Journalist and Script Writer, New Zealand Broadcasting Corporation, Wellington.