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Plane wreckage on Mt Erebus - Source: ONE News
Twenty five years after Air New Zealand flight 901 flew into the side of Antarctica's Mount Erebus, memories and events from that day are being unlocked for the first time.
The crash, in which all 257 on board were killed instantly, has gone down in history as New Zealand's worst ever aviation disaster.
In information that has just gone public, a United States Navy search plane can be heard locating what they thought to be the wreckage of Air New Zealand flight 901.
Just before midnight on 28 November 1979, Rex Hendry from Erebus Search and Rescue was woken up at Scott Base to hear the bad news. A helicopter was sent to the wreckage, with Hendry on board.
"The main thing that was going through my mind was that this is a big event; this is staggerly huge," says Hendry.
Although the helicopter was unable to land at the crash site, Hendry was able to confirm the dreaded news; there were no survivors.
"I think personally I was in shock...what I'd seen was beyond my comprehension," he says.
Twelve hours earlier, Hendry - along with many others - stood with his camera pointed at Mount Erebus, waiting to get photographs of the flight.
After it flew past, Hendry waited for the DC-10 to re-emerge from the other side of the mountain, but it didn't happen.
Back in New Zealand, as news on the disaster became more and more grim, Inspector Greg Gilpin of the New Zealand Police was told that he was going to Antarctica and that he would be in charge of recovering the bodies.
"I'd never been on snow before and I was thinking surely they wouldn't send us down there," says Gilpin.
"I grapped a couple of old thick jerseys and headed out to the airport," he says.
For 11 days, Gilpin pulled the dead from the ice.
"A lot of the bodies were frozen into the ice, we had to use ice picks to get them out."
Even today, Gilpin and Hendry say their memories of the disaster have not faded.
"I can still feel the knot in my stomach that I had for days and weeks after the event," says Rex Hendry.
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