Erebus - the icy questions

Memorial to the more than 250 New Zealanders who lost their lives on the slopes of Mt Erebus, Antarctica. Photo / Supplied

Ian Hambly spent six horrifying weeks in an Auckland morgue searching for his mates. As body after body arrived from the carnage that was Erebus, Hambly, a former traffic and police officer turned Air New Zealand steward, searched the faces and features hoping he would recognise the 21 Air New Zealand crew, most of whom he had worked with.

Hambly volunteered to help with "Operation Overdue" to speed up the crew identification and to spare distressed relatives the gruesome task. But the mission eventually ruined his marriage and family life and haunted him in the years that came after.

By the end of those six weeks, only one crew member's body was still missing - 23-year-old Aucklander Dianne Keenan. It's a regret he still has today. "I stayed there for the whole six weeks hoping to find her," Hambly says.

Instead, two months later, searchers spotted her body - identified by her teal-coloured uniform - lying at the bottom of a deep crevasse. The Keenan family were told it was too dangerous to risk retrieving her body and Dianne has been in that icy grave ever since.

All Hambly could give Dianne's shocked and grieving family was a singed diary, and even that small memento has left a question unanswered for three decades.

Dianne's name - written at the top right-hand corner of the first page - was missing, ripped out by an unidentified person. And her diary initially arrived back in Auckland labelled as belonging to the chief pilot, Jim Collins, in place of his black diary, thought to contain navigational briefing notes. Her family want to know why.

That mystery, and a list of others, is one reason the Erebus wounds are as deep today as they were in November 1979, when Flight 901 was declared overdue, then confirmed crashed, plunging a nation and a proud airline into shock.

At first, ambulances carrying Erebus victims made their way slowly along Karangahape Rd, having collected their tragic cargo from a Hercules at Whenuapai Air Base. They travelled across Grafton Bridge to the door of the morgue. Passersby stopped, shocked, and watched them go by. "It was an awful thing." Hambly murmurs.

But as the numbers of dead grew, a large refrigerated truck was hired. With police and medical staff only able to process up to 15 bodies a day, that truck became a makeshift morgue.

Hambly had dealt before with victims in traffic accidents, but nothing could prepare him for the horror that was Erebus.

Many of the passengers were standing when Flight 901 hit 3795m-high Mt Erebus at 480km/h. The snow-covered mountain simply disappeared from view and the pilots, thinking they were flying 43km to the west because of incorrect navigational co-ordinates, literally flew into it.