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The tragedy of Flight TE 901 touched many Kiwis but there was bitter controversy over investigations into the cause of the crash.
Erebus is a tragedy that to this day has scarred hundreds of lives, scars as long as the ones left on those frozen reaches 30 years ago.
Many still remember where they were when they heard the news.
Flight TE 901 left Auckland early on the morning of the 28 of November 1979.
But the pilot and the DC10 were flying to different destinations.
Captain Jim Collins thought he was on a course for McMurdo Sound. The plane was heading instead straight into the side of Mt Erebus.
Scott Base information officer, now Professor of Politics, Nigel Roberts, took the first official crash photos.
"I saw the picture of the tail of the DC10 with the Koru sign of course. I knew that picture of all the pictures I took that evening would be the one that would come to summarise the tragedy," says Roberts.
Chief Air Accident Investigator Ron Chippendale ruled the cause was pilot error - the plane was flying too low and the crew were not monitoring their actual position.
A Royal Commission of Inquiry was expected to back that theory but the judge heading the inquiry, Justice Peter Mahon, put the blame on the airline.
The co-ordinates on the plane's computer system had been changed the night before, he said, altering the course and no-one had told the pilot.
In fact, nobody on the plane knew that there was a 27-mile change.
The 10-month inquiry exposed inconsistencies in the testimony of some Air New Zealand witnesses.
One finding in Captain Collins' flight diary, possibly detailing the flight plan, had had its pages removed.
Air New Zealand sought to explain the system error as a series of co-incidental mistakes.
But Justice Mahon didn't buy it.
"I came to the ultimate view that I had been told by certain groups of witnesses for Air New Zealand an orchestrated litany of lies," Mahon said.
Air New Zealand later managed to get that infamous line struck out in the Court of Appeal, which found Mahon had breached natural justice and exceeded his terms of reference in concluding there had been a conspiracy to lie.
Former Air New Zealand captain Gordon Vette says Mahon blamed politics for the decision.
"He said 'politics boy', he said 'that's what it is, deep politics'," says Vette.
Mahon fought that ruling in the Privy Council but lost. However his findings on the crash cause remain, to this day, unchallenged.
So raw were the ensuing wounds, it was 20 years before Mahon's report was tabled in parliament.
And it took 30 long years for an apology from the airline, which happened just last month.
"Sorry to all of those who suffered the loss of a loved one or were affected by the Erebus tragedy and did not receive the support and compassion they should have," Air New Zealand CEO Rob Fife said to the family members of the Erebus victims.
They were words grieving families had waited decades to hear.
