![]() ![]() Editors may also seek a reassessment of the decision if they believe there was a mistake.įacts from this article were featured on Wikipedia's Main Page in the " On this day." column on November 28, 2006, November 28, 2007, November 28, 2008, November 28, 2010, November 28, 2012, and November 28, 2019. Once these issues have been addressed, the article can be renominated. There are suggestions below for improving the article to meet the good article criteria. Mount Erebus disaster was one of the Engineering and technology good articles, but it has been removed from the list. According to the relevant style guide, this should not be changed without broad consensus. Vette is survived by his wife Charmaine and three children from a previous marriage, one of whom is an airline pilot for Cathay Pacific.Ĭhristine Negroni’s book Lost and Confounded: Investigating the World’s Most Mysterious Air Crashes from the Hawaii Clipper to Malaysia 370, which is due out next year from Penguin Books, includes a section on Flight 901.This article is written in New Zealand English, which has its own spelling conventions ( colour, realise, analyse, centre, fiord) and some terms that are used in it may be different or absent from Australian, British, and other varieties of English. The event is the subject of the movie Mercy Mission and the book, Emergency! Crisis on the Flight Deck. He located the plane and directed it to land just as the Cessna piloted by American Jay Prochnow was running out of fuel. Although he had a planeload of passengers, Vette involved them in a search for the airplane, diverting his flight and looking for the Cessna using a series of logical navigational steps. Less than a year before the Flight 901 disaster, he had established himself as a hero when, while in command of an Air New Zealand flight from Fiji to Auckland, he heard a distress call from a small Cessna pilot who was lost enroute to the Pacific island of Norfolk. Vette received the New Zealand Order of Merit in 2007. ![]() In 1983 he wrote the book Impact Erebus discussing the theory in full. Vette’s theory of sector whiteout, where visibility is affected in just one direction, is now an accepted factor in arctic flying. Vette’s alternative explanation was considered credible, and was incorporated into the commission’s final report, which was officially accepted by the government in 1999. Vette discovered that in certain conditions, the powerful effect of “whiteout” eliminated visual borders, and that pilots might not see obstacles as big as mountains directly in front of them. Photos developed from the passengers’ cameras found in the wreckage showed that the weather over Antarctica had been clear moments before the crash, launching Vette on a search to find out why none of the men on the flight deck saw or tried to avoid the mountain as the plane approached it descending through 2,500 feet. To have done what the chief investigator claimed, there would have to be an “unlikely level of simultaneous incompetence on behalf of all the crew members” Vette told a local newspaper. While the government investigation said the pilots had been flying too low and in limited visibility, Vette challenged the finding. After an official government report blamed pilot error, a Royal Commission inquiry to review that conclusion found that Air New Zealand had altered the routing on the flight, taking it over high terrain without notifying the pilots, who had been briefed that the flight would be flying over ocean and west of Mt. Erebus on a clear day in November 1979, killing all 257 people onboard. Erebus disaster that challenged the official government explanation for the crash and accused Air New Zealand of a cover-up campaign.Īir New Zealand Flight 901 was a one-day sightseeing flyover of Antarctica. But he was also the subject of controversy when his work became part of an investigation into the 1979 Mt. He was 82.Ĭaptain Vette was the subject of two movies and the recipient of numerous honors for heroics carried out while flying DC-10s for Air New Zealand. Alwyn Gordon Vette, a New Zealander pilot whose independent analysis of an airplane crash in Antarctica helped to identify an important hazard in Arctic flying, died Sunday at a hospital in Auckland after a long illness. ![]()
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