The night Flight 901 went down: Paul Holmes' new book

Wreckage from the Mt Erebus site where an Air New Zealand DC-10 crash killed 275 people in November 1979. Photo / File

On November 28, 1979 an Air New Zealand DC-10 on a sightseeing trip to Antarctica crashed into Mt Erebus, killing all 257 people on board. In his book 'Daughters of Erebus,' Paul Holmes reveals how the news unfolded for the family of pilot Jim Collins - his wife Maria and four daughters Kathryn, Elizabeth, Pip and Adrienne - as they waited anxiously in their St Heliers home.

At about 7 o'clock the Collins' world began to change forever. Maria took a phone call from Captain Dave Eden, director of flight operations at Air New Zealand.

"I think Jim was due home at nine and I'd have dinner with him later. I'd feed the children first. Dave Eden from Flight Ops rang me and said, 'we're just a bit concerned about Jim's flight. We haven't heard from him for a while. Are you on your own?' And I said, 'well, the kids are here'. He said, 'have you got another adult there with you?' And I said no, and he said, 'might be an idea'. And that was when cold fear struck me."

"Immediate adulthood," Elizabeth calls it in her memoir. She watched the 9 o'clock news. She remembers hearing newsreader Phillip Sherry saying that the aircraft had by now run out of fuel and there was still no sign of it. The aircraft had, therefore, to be down. "We couldn't believe what we were hearing. Phillip Sherry must be wrong."

According to Elizabeth, Maria then rang Jim's very good friend, another DC-10 captain, Ross Gordon, to ask if he had any idea of what might have happened. Ten minutes later Ross and his wife Marg arrived round at the Collins'.

In the hours, days and years to come, Jim Collins could wish for no finer, more protective friend for his grieving family than Ross Gordon. Ross Gordon is dead now, but in the frightful days of grief about to erupt upon the home of Jim and Maria Collins, Ross and Marg Gordon performed as if God himself had sent them. Ross handled the phone calls and the news media. This was how 6-year-old Adrienne learnt the word "residence". Ross answered the phone with, "Collins residence". Adrienne says that in those days she also learnt the word "sympathy". Before long, she says, she would also learn the word "error".

Marg ran the house and made sure Maria remembered to eat and drink. Marg sorted the hundreds of letters and cards that poured in from round the country from complete strangers and arranged a little thank you note Maria could sign each morning. The house became a mass of flowers. I have wondered, as I've got to know the Collins women, if even then, in those very first days, the country sensed something fine and honourable about this family and about this airman. Perhaps it was simply the regard anyone feels for a mother of four daughters who has just lost her husband and four girls their father.

Elizabeth remembers Ross being straight with Maria that night, telling her Jim must have exhausted his fuel by now. Maria told her parents and Kathryn and Elizabeth that the crew and the passengers would have no chance of survival in the dreadful cold of Antarctica and that if the aircraft had gone down, death would be quick. "The last thing she would want was for Jim to suffer in any way."

Kathryn says: "I remember the black, gold and brown patterned sundress Mum was wearing. And I can remember thinking about icebergs and landing in Antarctica and that if the plane had landed on the icy sea, Dad would be the last one off. I pictured him stepping off the wing on to an iceberg but being very cold as he was only in summer uniform. He would be very worried about his passengers. He would put them first, before him." That thought didn't bode well for his survival.

So they all sat there, waiting for news: Maria, Kathryn, Elizabeth, Maria's parents, Josef and Annemarie Tretter, and Ross and Marg, trying to be bright, trying to be optimistic.

The hours were slow. They were joined by an old friend of Maria's parents, Karel Beran. Karel was a Czech refugee in his 60s, a dear and trusted friend of the family with a concentration camp tattoo on his forearm. Karel had been a significant figure in the Czech underground during the war. He survived two and a half years in Auschwitz, then Mauthausen, then the Death March at the end of the war from Mauthausen, the concentration camp outside Vienna. Kathryn remembers Karel looking worried and thinking that if he looked worried, after everything he'd been through, and if he had no answers and none of the adults had any answers, then things were bad.

Kathryn went to bed after the 9 o'clock news. Her grandfather, Josef, suggested there was nothing she could do by staying up and that she should try to get some sleep ahead of her science exam the next morning. Josef the survivor, the one who knew things were getting very bad in Vienna though so many others told him they would blow over, who knew you had to carry on, believed Kathryn had to sit her School Certificate exam the next morning. That was what life was about. Carrying on. Enduring and carrying on. Kathryn says it was just assumed she would sit the exam. There was never any doubt, never any discussion. So she went to bed. The lights remained on upstairs and there was the opening and closing of doors. She slept fitfully.

Philippa, or Pip, says of this day, November 28, 1979: "Dad left early that morning. It was still dark. I crawled into bed with Mum. After school, I went to Brownies. I came home late afternoon. We had dinner. It was still light outside and the weather was calm. Mum took a phone call. I remember standing in the kitchen looking at the World Book Encyclopaedia open on the bench where I had been looking something up for my homework, and knowing something was terribly wrong."

Jim had bought the girls the World Book Encyclopaedia with a small inheritance from a deceased English relative. Like his father-in-law, Jim was passionate about education. He had failed School Certificate the first time and it weighed on him. He was educated in the air force. Maria had a Bachelor of Science from Otago University.

"I remember my grandparents, Mum's parents, Josef and Annemarie, sitting in our living room," Pip says. "It was still light outside. My grandfather sat solemnly in a big brown chair. It was so out of the ordinary. When Josef and Annemarie came over, we never sat in the living room. We talked and moved round and there was a sense of vibrancy. This was very different."

Somewhere in that earlier part of the night, Maria took Pip and Adrienne to bed. Maria remembers one of the girls asking if there was something wrong with Dad's flight. Maria says she made light of it.

"I said, 'oh, they're a bit worried, but don't worry about it, go to bed.' Or maybe I just hid it from them. There's a childish thing in me that if I don't talk about it, it isn't there. You know what I mean? I know it's infantile but there is this sort of, 'don't say anything ...'."

It was gone 1am. Still no news. No further phone call from Air New Zealand. No official visit from anyone at Air New Zealand. Nothing. Ross and Marg Gordon went home. Still up and waiting were Maria, Elizabeth, Maria's parents and Karel Beran.

Elizabeth knew she had to stay up and be with her mother. "That was my calling, to be there for Mum. Mum, Dadum [her grandmother] and I sat in silence at the kitchen table hoping for a phone call. We waited and waited. I felt I must be there to support Mum."

Maria says she felt it was a bad dream. "It was difficult to believe that we were living through this."

The call that changed their lives came, Maria thinks, between 1.30 and 2 in the morning, from Captain Dave Eden. Elizabeth does not recall her mother's words during the phone call but remembers Maria's responses were short. "Something told me the outcome was pretty serious. When Mum got off the phone she explained what it was and burst into tears."

Eden's message to Maria was two-pronged. Wreckage of a DC-10 had been sighted on the lower slopes of Mt Erebus and the wreckage was such that there could be no survivors.

Maria put the phone down from Eden and cried out. "I howled loudly. I didn't want to bring up the girls alone and be lonely, lonely, lonely! I remember shrieking, 'now I'm going to be alone and these poor children won't have a dad'." She thinks that was the only time she was "poor me".

Kathryn, in her bedroom, can't quite remember what caused her to get up. Her grandfather may have come downstairs to wake her or she may have heard her mother's broken-hearted cries. She doesn't remember exactly. Kathryn, 15 years old, got out of bed and went upstairs to the kitchen. There, Karel told her gently that aircraft wreckage had been found and that everyone was dead.

"I couldn't really quite believe what that meant. Other than that my life had changed forever and that now I'd have to try and work out what Dad would have wanted me to do. The thought was daunting. I was looking at the faces of my family and the devastation I saw there. I felt so sorry for my mother. I was heartbroken.

"The memory still brings tears to my eyes 30 years later."

Pip remembers being woken by Elizabeth: "I lay in bed as she opened the door and the hall light shone in. She told me the wreckage had been found, on a mountain. I had an instant mental picture of a green-forested mountain, like in the Rockies. I think I'd assumed Antarctica was flat. I got up and went into the kitchen. Mum was at the kitchen table, by the phone. I had never seen her look the way she did. I'm not sure what it was - her pallor, her demeanour, sense of devastation - or just the fact that she was crying. I had certainly never seen her cry."

About 3 in the morning, everyone went to bed. Maria lay awake. There were things she had to do. All of the schools had to be called in a few hours. Elizabeth had watched her mother carefully all evening and into the frightful, empty morning hours of hopeless desolation. She watched her with those same large blue eyes that followed Jim everywhere, watched the way he drove the car, watched the way he changed the oil, watched the way he used his carpentry tools and watched the way he walked in his black uniform. Now her beautiful father was dead. He would never come home. How was this possible?

She slipped into bed with Maria. She lay in the dark next to her mother, asking many questions. How did she think Dad might have died? Should we wash the shirt he had left on his spare chair? What should we do with his clothes? Would Mum get married again? Mum gently suggested Elizabeth try to get some sleep and they could talk about all of those things in the morning. Elizabeth could smell her father in the bed, could smell his hair on the pillow.

"I knew he was dead," she says. "But I couldn't comprehend it. I mean, I absolutely understood what it meant but I couldn't, you know... There was a chair in his room that had his home work clothes on it. His jeans were folded, his shirt was folded, his suede shoes with the socks coming out of them, ready for him to pop on when he came home. There were the clothes in the corner of the room but there wasn't going to be anybody coming home to wear them."

Should they wake the little girls and tell them what had happened? No, said Maria. Let them sleep. Let them be normal for a few more hours. Switch your brain off and go to sleep.

Adrienne, at 6 years old, had few memories of the early evening of November 28, 1979. "I remember it was light, dinner time-ish and Kathryn and Elizabeth had been fighting and the next minute they were crying. That's all I remember of the night."

She recalls more of the next morning: "I wake up. It's early. I get up and walk out of my room, see that my parents' room and my sisters' rooms are empty. Everyone is up already. That doesn't surprise me - something serious was happening last night. I walk up to the living room. Mum, my three sisters and an older family friend - probably Karel Beran - are seated round the coffee table. There is sadness and crying. I kneel down beside my sister, Pip, and say, 'he's dead, isn't he?' Pip nods. Her face is sad. I don't feel like crying."

Edited extract, reproduced from 'Daughters of Erebus' by Paul Holmes with permission from Hachette New Zealand Ltd, published by Hodder Moa, $49.99 RRP, available nationwide on Monday.