![]() ![]() He doesn't think he's alone in regarding Air New Zealand's chief executive Rob Fyfe's recent apology as a "Clayton's apology". I can't remember whether I actually got comment or not, but I got an attitude."Įach year, especially on the anniversary of the disaster, Livingstone revisits memories of his own flight and wonders when the controversy will end. "I was fairly flagrant in having it on the seat beside me. In the early 1980s he remembers reading Justice Peter Mahon's Royal Commission report during an Air New Zealand flight to Sydney - much to the chagrin of the hostesses. ![]() A quest that has seen him read and re-read all the official reports, discuss the topic with interested parties often, and even write a letter (unpublished) to the editor of this newspaper. It was just the start of a quest, some would say obsession, that has occupied quite a bit of Livingstone's spare time since. ![]() He quickly found his life hadn't been endangered - that it was only the flight of Novemthat had been on a collision course. "How dare they have endangered us all with recklessness over such a long time? I immediately suspected cover-up and was determined to get to the bottom of that." The more he thought about it, the more it disturbed him. "I thought it was only due to good weather, and thus deviation from the programmed track, that our flight - and others - didn't suffer the same fate. "There were rumblings that the aircraft track had been altered and that such error had persisted for 14 months." That meant his flight, taken a year earlier, must also have been heading for disaster. When David Livingstone first read news reports that the 1979 Air New Zealand Flight TE901 had been programmed to fly on a collision course with Mt Erebus in Antarctica, he was angry and a little unnerved. David Livingstone has spent 30 years delving into the causes of the Erebus disaster. ![]()
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