Maria Collins and her four daughters have seen human nature at its best and worst.

Twenty-five years ago, they lost husband and father Jim Collins in an air crash at the frozen end of the world.

Friends and workmates of Captain Collins helped them weather taunts at school and deal with a burglary in which a bedside photo of him was torn in half.

Pilot colleagues pitched in to finish a fence and deck he had started building as Mrs Collins faced raising a family of girls - aged 6 to 15 - without a husband but with a mountain of support from well-wishers.

But although thousands of others also lost loved ones on November 28, 1979, when an Air New Zealand flight slammed into the slopes of the volcano Mt Erebus - named after the gateway to the underworld of Greek mythology - the Collins family bore an extra burden of grief.

For they felt saddened that a Government-owned airline sent their husband and father to Antarctica, then blamed him for his own death and those of 256 others while allegedly covering up its own failings.

"If someone dies it's a tragedy, but if their integrity is questioned as well, it's much worse," says the eldest Collins daughter, Kathryn Carter, now 40 and with four children of her own.

"I suppose it's always easier to blame people who are dead, and I think it put a question mark over the integrity of the airline itself."

Elizabeth Collins, 39, remembers her father as a stickler for safety, a man who never let his children into the family runabout boat without emergency drills and equipment checks.

"Considering the airline sent to Antarctica only its most experienced pilots, to then call their integrity into question was particularly surprising," she said.

Although Justice Peter Mahon found that her father and co-pilot Greg Cassin did nothing to cause the crash, the Muldoon Government refused to accept the report it commissioned from the judge, and the document was not tabled in Parliament until 1999.

By then, the Collins girls had all become strong and independent adults, "scarred but not damaged", in their mother's assessment.

But immediately after the Erebus disaster, they had to face the curiosity of a stunned nation, and even unthinking cruelty within their own circles.

"One of the first things a friend at school said in a matter-of-fact tone was `Sorry about what's happened, but it was his fault'," recalls Philippa Collins, who was 9 at the time and is now a 34-year-old business development manager for a multinational professional services firm.

But the girls and Mrs Collins remained confident in the abilities of a man they remember for a "schoolboy's love of flying", who would always turn his head skyward if a plane flew overhead while he was in the garden or in the well-ordered workshop where he passed on practical tips to his daughters.