Thirty years ago, this weekend. November 29, 1979, the day of national agony, when the nation learned that Jim Collins' DC10 had ploughed at full thrust into the lower slopes of Antarctica's Mt Erebus.

Before that fateful day, I imagine few of us had ever heard of Erebus. Since then there is not one of us who has not. The mountain's name has come to mean only one thing, the loss of life in that ferocious fraction of a second as the giant machine collided with the ancient, fiery Erebus with vast explosive force.

I was not living in New Zealand at the time. I had already been in Europe for some years. I have spoken lots over the years to broadcasting colleagues about what that night was like here. None of them has forgotten. Each has a story and those on duty that night all have some special moment or event to relate.

I was in Amsterdam. I had a job reading news on the Dutch World Service. A few weeks before Erebus, I bought a beautiful radio that received FM, long wave and medium wave signals. The BBC World Service, just across the North Sea, in those days broadcast a very clear signal on long wave. It beamed the news-reading voices into Holland with a rich, throaty sound.

One day, I turned on the BBC news in the little apartment I rented with a South African couple from Johannesburg.

It was early afternoon in Holland. I do not remember the lead story in the bulletin. The second or third item, however, stopped me in my tracks. An Air New Zealand DC10 with 257 people on board was overdue on a sightseeing flight to Antarctica. It had exhausted the amount of time the fuel it carried allowed it to be in the air.

My immediate thoughts were that the aircraft had suffered structural or engineering failure. Remember, DC10s were, in those days, dropping out of the skies. The first serious malfunction involved the Turkish DC10 flying out of Paris. In another incident, a DC10 lifting out of Chicago had an engine fall off shortly after take-off. An International Airline Pilots' Association lawyer I sat next to on a flight from the London to Los Angeles shortly after the Chicago disaster once told me he had known that pilot and "Wally" flew that aircraft in that instant of engine loss "by the book". The "book", he said, had turned out to be the opposite of what Wally should have done.

Of course, what emerged about the DC10 crash into the slopes of Mt Erebus was infinitely more complicated. And to this day, despite the vast hours of research conducted and the mountains of evidence assembled, no one seems to know for certain why the accident happened.

Some of the finest, most experienced pilots and investigative minds have applied themselves to the question.