A Second Look at the ‘Mount Erebus Disaster’, 28 November 1979
Overview: Mount Erebus Disaster: Air New Zealand Flight TE901, 28 Nov. 1979*
The crash of an Air New Zealand DC-10 in Antarctica in 1979 is re-examined in this dispatch as a possible coup d’état designed to threaten the Establishment to move bureaucratic mountains for an envisaged trans-corporate heist of the economy.
Former Māori Television news and current affairs editor Steve Snoopman probes the crooked competence, coiling circumstances and the crony chesspieces that belie a catalytic crisis with so many mistakes, the ‘accident’ seems ‘too stupid to be stupid’.
Snoopman also highlights the curious coincidences, that appear to riff off historical events with such uncanny frequency, they seem to whistle a ‘history rhymes’ tune.
This catalytic event seemed to be packaged with an intent to stealthily ‘process’ New Zealand’s ruling families, as well as Western Élites, attuned to reading the runes.
The Establishment’s key insiders would readily detect the omens lurking in the metadata like marauding monsters, as if penned by Shakespeare or Dante. In Greek mythology, Erebus was the son of Chaos, the personification of darkness, and the name given to the caverns on the way to Hades, or Hell. Since the airline had changed the flight coordinates hours before take-off without telling the pilots, Air New Zealand had in essence moved a mountain in front of the flight crew. It appears a metaphor-laden ‘telegram’ was codified into the event that said to N.Z.’s ruling families; ‘move bureaucratic mountains for a trans-corporate hostile raid of the economy, or you’ll go to hell in a shredded sardine can — at any time we choose.’
For his part, the Royal Commissioner, Justice Peter Mahon, finished his report stating that he believed there had been a deliberate concealment of the misleading flight plan when it was sent to McMurdo Station, Antarctica. Mahon inferred someone wanted the DC-10 to crash into Erebus. Mahon’s report triggered a police investigation, but this was shut-down without prosecutions. Police Detective Superintendent Brian Wilkinson was ordered to make the probe disappear.
With this cover-up, the government stuck to fingering the cause on pilot error.
Consequently, the Snoopman re-examined the crash of the Flight TE901, as a possible coup d’état designed to threaten the Establishment to move bureaucratic mountains for the envisaged trans-corporate heist of the economy that eventuated.
The strangeness of the Erebus tale lingered long after the acrimonious legal battles, that followed the rigorous Royal Commission of Inquiry run by Peter Mahon.
The demise of an Air New Zealand-owned Airbus off the coast of France was uncanny because it occurred precisely one year ahead of the 30th anniversary. The ‘coincidental’ crash appeared to telegraph caution, particularly since the Erebus air accidents investigator, Ron Chippendale was run down by an out-of-control car, while out on his morning walk in early 2008; his death seemed themed. The date, February 12, was the 99th anniversary of a sinking that was blamed on the captain.
The three events surveyed in this Erebus tale reveal a striking pattern of apparently metaphor-laden news, embedded with codified symbolism to signal authorship, narrative, scapegoats, to warn, telegraph trajectory and to convey psychotic humour.
Moreover, the ‘lucky’ scheduling of Sir Hillary Edmund to speak at an American business conference appeared to portend the doomed 901 flight, on November 28. The Knight Commander of the Order of the British Empire was double-booked and was due to be commentator on the fatal flight. This was Sir Ed’s second close call with an air disaster, since he was late for a United Flight in December 1960, that collided with a Trans World Airlines flight over New York. The collision appeared to signal that the Kennedy Presidency was an existential threat to the deep state.
Therefore, the 1979 Mount Erebus Disaster is explored as a possible air terrorism coup d’état that set the stage for a corporate heist of the economy, and for the realm to be cast as a set, to periodically inflict novel trojan horse shocks for amplification.
Key Finding: The collision of Air New Zealand Flight TE901 on November 28 1979 looked, slinked and smelt like air terrorism inflicted to scare New Zealand’s ruling families to get on board with the planned corporate heist of the economy. It may also have been inflicted to act as a talisman to the Western Élites attuned to such symbol sorcery, to move bureaucratic mountains for the forging of a global super economy, or more mountains could be moved in front of flight crews — any time.
Into the Erebus Abyss — Air New Zealand Flight TE901 Rabbit Hole Redux
The crash of an Air New Zealand DC-10 in Antarctica in 1979 remains controversial, with arguments ranging over points that finger blame within an ‘accident’ paradigm.
Yet, the discordance over matters of culpability for the catalytic crash — involving 257 deaths, the loss of a DC10 and the acrimony between the main parties — never considered whether the collision’s cause should’ve been investigated as air terrorism.
This collision of Flight TE-901 with Mount Erebus on November 28 1979, was ranked at the time as the world’s fourth deadliest civilian airliner accident. Three of these crashes involved McConnell Douglas DC-10s. It shocked the nation of three million.
The Air NZ-owned McConnell Douglas DC-10 slammed into the lower slopes of the ‘13,000’ ft volcano, below Fang Ridge at a speed of about 500 miles per hour. All 257 mortals aboard the ‘trip of a lifetime’ tourist flight perished as the shock-waves, ice and rock shredded the DC-10, and as the fire balls from the exploding jet-fuel seared flesh, fabrics and furnishings and if any remained alive, they quickly froze as if like discarded mannequins bent, broken, and burnt after a department store inferno.
But, the horrific event of the DC-10 colliding with a mountain was only the beginning of the shredding. Upon learning that the wrecked DC-10’s flight coordinates had been changed about six hours before take-off and no one had told the flight crew, the airline’s CEO Morrie Davis, ordered documents be shredded. Cue Pink Panther theme.
Shredded also, were the reputations of the two captains, as well as the airline’s senior management which included numerous pilots, along with the credibility of the regulator, and its chief inspector of air accidents, as well as the royal commissioner.
By the 10th anniversary, even the airline’s state ownership had been shredded.
And shredded too, were the lives of the living with intimate proximity to the dead.
Royal Commissioner, Justice Peter Mahon, tried to get to the bottom of how exactly Air New Zealand’s navigation section, in essence, moved a mountain in front of the McConnell Douglas DC-10, in the wee hours of the morning before the fatal flight, and yet, failed to tell the air-crew that the flight coordinates had been changed.
The expression, “shift a mountain”, was spoken by an Air New Zealand pilot, Captain Gordon Vette, who made this remark ahead of a docu-drama, Erebus: The Aftermath, broadcast on Television NZ (“Litany of Lies” NZ Listener, October 17-23, 1987). Mr Vette said none of the issues into the lack of the disclosure about the hazards of white-out, as well as the failure to supply the aircrew with training flights to the region, and nor the flight coordinate’s change in the dead of night — were ever answered by the airline or by any state officials. Captain Vette found over five hundred omissions, errors and in-actions had occurred while researching his 1983 book, Impact Erebus, and as Peter Mahon pointed out in his own subsequent book, Verdict on Erebus.
A crucial change to the flight coordinates of the destination waypoint for McMurdo Sound occurred at 1:40 am on the morning of November 28 1979 — under seven hours before the doomed TE-901 flight took-off. Although the change was a matter of 27 nautical miles, no one at Flight Operations, or the Navigation Section or at the Flight Despatch Office within Air New Zealand elected to inform the flight crew about an un-movable object on the new path. Was an overcast forecast the deciding factor?
The phenomena of white-out causes a loss of depth of field vision perception. Because the crew thought they were flying over the sea heading into McMurdo Sound — rather than toward the rising terrain of a mountain — the overcast cloud base down to 2000 feet, combined with dry air created an almost seamless blending of the icy snowy mountain. The ‘seam’, if discerned, would appear as a horizon far off in the distance, creating the appearance of icy sea below and overcast cloud above and ahead. The effect is created by sunlight beaming in at a low angle from behind the jet, while the sun’s light is reflected off the white surfaces, into the cockpit. The dry air collapses depth of field. The sun was at a low angle on the horizon at that time of year, at that time of the afternoon. The overcast weather sealed the flight’s fate, perfectly horribly, since the low sunlight reflects off the cloud base, to create a ‘horizon line’ effect.
Due to their unfamilairity with the south polar region, the crew witlessly misidentified features of landscape, while experiencing sector white-out as they approached Lewis Bay instead of McMurdo Sound, and headed toward rising terrain.
Of the flight crew, only the flight engineer Gordon Brooks had been to Antarctica.
The airline claimed there was no need for educating flight crews about the white-out, nor a need for training flights to the region. The Civil Aviation Division never explained why its governance of the Air NZ’s Antarctic Flight programme was so poor.
The routing difference was ‘thought’ to be only 2.1 nautical miles, according to Air New Zealand’s official narrative that emerged once this epic ‘blunder’ came to light.
Thus, with the 901 flight track altered in the dead of night to head for Mount Erebus at low altitude, the US Navy Air Traffic Control Tower at McMurdo Station would lose VHF radio communications with the doomed DC-10 from 40 miles out. That is, produce radio silence, both literally and metaphorically. The HF radio signal was intermittent. After its spiral descent, the DC-10 was speeding toward icy rock.
Moreover, when the flight plan was transmitted to the MacCenter Flight Tower at the U.S. Navy’s McMurdo Station after Flight TE-901 had taken off, it contained the place name “McMurdo” instead of the changed coordinate, 166 degrees 58 minutes East.
If the MacCenter had seen the altered coordinates (which should have read: 164 degrees 48 minutes), the flight tower could never have condoned a desent to send the DC-10 on a collision course with Mount Erebus, since the difference was 27 nautical miles from the previous flights. Yet, the flight controller at MacCenter was not perturbed with the DC-10 descending to 1500ft. The MacCenter either assumed the flight was heading into McMurdo Sound along the usual route that had existed for 14 months, or there was a contrived ignorance in play. The place name “McMurdo” on the flight plan, instead of the coordinates, wasn’t questioned by the flight controller.
Mahon explains in “Mistake No. 11” how this error was said to have occurred:
“A Navigation Section witness said that when he wrote in the new co-ordinates changing the destination waypoint (as was mistakenly thought) from the NDB to the TACAN,* he inserted the new waypoints in the correct columns of the worksheet which would be used to programme the computer and he then wrote in the figure ‘5’ which would tell the computer that a change in coordinates was being made. In order to bring about this result, the figure ‘5’ had to be written in column 55 of the worksheet. But by mistake, the witness wrote the figure ‘5’ into column 65. This had the accidental result of causing the computer, once the figure ‘5’ was inserted in this manner, to obliterate the TACAN coordinates which had also been inserted, and to replace them with the word ‘McMurdo’. A photocopy of this erroneous worksheet was produced in evidence. The occurrence of the error was almost impossible to understand having regard to the close familiarity of this witness and others with every detail on this printed worksheet. In addition, counsel who cross-examined this witness pointed to a scarcely decipherable note on it which appeared to suggest that the worksheet did not in fact relate to this particular flight track alteration. In other words, the validity of this exhibit came under suspicion.” — Peter Mahon, Verdict on Erebus, p. 139.
* TACAN (Tactical Air Navigation Aid): a military navigation device of limited use to civilian aircraft; NDB (Non-Directional Beacon) with which a pilot can plot direction; a waypoint in aviation is a predefined geographical position that is a reference point for navigation, often used in planning and executing flight paths by coordinates.
With the sector white-out completing the illusion that Captain Collins and his flight crew believed they were headed down McMurdo Sound over flat sea-ice, the aircraft was guaranteed to smack into Mount Erebus in the vicinity of Fang Ridge, if they were flying at an altitude of 12,000 ft or less. The AINS course-correction device was in ‘nav mode’ at the time of impact at 12:49pm, or at 11 minutes to ‘13 o’clock’.
With these facts laid out, the commissioner’s report upended Chippendale’s report, although it was not until a few months prior to the 20th anniversary, that the Mahon Report was tabled in N.Z.’s Parliament. This official acceptance, by then-Minister of Transport Maurice Williamson on August 25 1999, occurred with the recognition that Justice Mahon’s report had raised the bar of aviation accident investigations.
However, Justice Mahon appears to have made two critical errors in his probe. He seems to have eliminated air terrorism as a causal possibility due to an abundance of cultural naïvety. Such naïvety thrives amid widespread societal submission to the classified compartmentalized culture exercised by all national security states amid their rise during the current ongoing Third Hundred Years’ War, which began around 1900 over heated rivalries over territories to control the world’s new prize: oil.
If this is the case, Judge Mahon, I contend, compounded his first mistake by drawing his conclusions that the Erebus Crash was an ‘accident’ as a consequence of a series of “administrative blunders”, without eliminating this particular broad causal class of conspiracy inflicted to achieve far-reaching objectives by malicious design. However, Mahon may have left the door that lead to the terrorism corridor — ajar. For he did conclude at the end of his report that a deliberate concealment of the changed flight coordinates had occurred, since he found the excuses of Air New Zealand’s Chief Navigator, Brian Hewitt, to lack credibility; 901’s demise gets curiouser and curiouser.
Justice Mahon copped vitriol, particularly from the Prime Minister, Robert Muldoon.
The spectacle of N.Z.’s PM publicly chastising Mahon communicated to New Zealanders that the Muldoon Cabinet had expected the Supreme Court judge to produce a rubber-stamp report, rather than a thorough inquiry. The Attorney General James McLay had been forced by circumstances to authorize a Royal Commission.
Neither the Air Line Pilots Association, nor the press nor the public were convinced by the official line, which included Chippendale’s whitewash report that smoothed over the culpability of Air NZ and also his employer, the Civil Aviation Division.
To anyone not invested in maintaining the Establishment’s tendencies to close ranks, this flak gave the game away that the Muldoon Administration expected the Royal Commission report to simply endorse the report of Ron Chippendale, the Chief Inspector of Air Accidents. Chippendale ascribed the probable cause of the crash as:
“the captain’s decision to continue to fly at low altitude in an area with poor surface and horizon definition when the crew was not certain of their position and the subsequent inability to detect the rising terrain which intercepted the aircraft’s flight path.”
However, it was only in the last 45 seconds of the flight that misgivings about the conditions were raised, and Captain Jim Collins asked which direction was best to turn to climb out. The ground proximity warning sounded six seconds before impact.
Film from passenger cameras recovered at the crash site showed the aircraft was flying in clear air during the approach to Lewis Bay, meaning the pilots were not lost in thick cloud, as Chippendale had initially believed. Chippendale had the cockpit transcript altered to conform to a narrative that the pilots continued to fly amid mounting alarm about their position. The Attorney General, Jim McClay, had attempted to short-circuit the possibility of a public inquiry by front-footing the air accidents inspector’s investigation, which lacked transparency about who said what with few written witness statements. The police failed to secure Air New Zealand House and the Civil Aviation Division’s offices as possible crime scenes the evening of November 28.
At the Royal Commission, Mahon pointed out to Chippendale that his attribution of probable cause was actually the proximate cause, or the last mistake in a series of errors at the airline that lead to the aircraft colliding with a snowy white mountain.
The planning for these flights was rushed, as Mahon noticed. Shortcomings that continued to the horrific end, included: Air New Zealand’s flight division avoided supplying the printed flight coordinates for pilots to take away to study, nor the flight division ensuring there was training about white-out, and not supplying printed copies of the flight path on topographical maps, but rather on maps produced by the airline’s marketing wing. And also, the navigation section’s poor data checking.
Mahon’s scathing report called out a cover-up. Mahon named 12 airline staff whose activities warranted further scrutiny, which triggered a police investigation.
And thus, Police Superintendent Brian Wilkinson was recruited for the task to salvage the cover-up, lest its stressed plot rivets, screws and welding were ripped apart by the catalytic forces of potential prosecution proceedings. Because, a criminal court case of conspiracy would not only be bad optics for Muldoon’s already shaky administration.
A trial had the potential to make a wreckage of a sitting government, the standing of the Beehive in the public mind, and widen into an exposure of an epic conspiracy, that might have led to questions about whether airliner take-downs were commonplace.
After all, Justice Mahon finished his report stating that he believed there was a deliberate concealment of the misleading flight plan when it was sent to McMurdo.
Moreover, there were suspicious aftermath events that included: the disappearance of Captain Jim Collins’ notes in a black ring-binder recovered at the crash site (he was known to hand-write his flight coordinates); a break-in at the Collins’ house; a diary removed from the co-pilot’s house and the infamous shredding of documents at Air New Zealand House. Therefore, while Police Disaster Victim Identification Squad (DVI) diligently, but naïvely, gathered the bodies, body parts and belongings from the crash site — damage control had set in at the airline in cahoots with the Beehive.
‘Coincidentally’, a new Disaster Victim Identification Squad had a training exercise a few weeks prior to the Erebus disaster, and had a ‘revision day’ at Police National Headquarters, Wellington, on the day of the crash. Exercises ‘taken live’ are a key sign of a black operation, as Webster Tarpley’s 9/11 Synthetic Terror made abundantly clear.
Police Detective Superintendent Brian Wilkinson was ordered to close the case file into the Erebus Disaster without any prosecutions. Years later, Wilkinson related to his very old friend Peter Mahon, that he was told to make the probe disappear, slowly, according to retired Auckland University law lecturer, Stuart MacFarlane, whose book The Erebus Papers was published in 1991. Cue Austin Powers theme tune.
➼ Spy Connection? A Theory of Bavarian Bureaucracy Penetration
In his imaginatively titled autobiography, Muldoon, Muldoon said New Zealanders needed to realize that not only is the world a “hard, cold” place. But, also that New Zealand is subject to economic warfare attacks, as well as subversion by actors who find it easier to penetrate the N.Z. system than the more heavily defended systems of its allies. Muldoon reformed the New Zealand Intelligence Council with these issues in mind, to afford closer liaison between the Police’s Intelligence Section, the Security Intelligence Service, and the External Intelligence Bureau. However, in Spyhunter: The Secret History of German Intelligence, Michael Shrimpton stated a small German intelligence ring stationed in Wellington had penetrated N.Z’.s state bureaucracy.
Evidently, the Deutsche Verteidigungs Dienst (DVD) — a secret intelligence agency within Germany’s military — at Dachau, near Munich, developed a specialist air terrorism division in the aftermath of World War II — because West Germany was prevented from possessing the new weapon of terror: nuclear bombs. Shrimpton says the SIS’s failure to identify career bureaucrat, Bill Sutch, as a DVD agent, led directly to the undisturbed penetration of New Zealand’s state bureaucracy by the DVD ring, to carry-on their subversion. The DVD has been carrying out industrial espionage, sabotage, and air terrorism to financially attack jet manufacturers, airliners and state treasuries in an undeclared war targetting civilians across the world, Shrimpton wrote.
Among the twelve named by Justice Mahon, whose potential culpability for the crash was emphasized toward the end of his report, were Air New Zealand’s Chief Pilot Captain Ian Harding Gemmell and Air New Zealand’s Chief Navigator Brian Hewitt.
During the Royal Commission into the ‘Mount Erebus Disaster’, Gemmell insisted the ‘accident’ wouldn’t have happened if Captain Jim Collins had been flying at 16,000 ft.
Gemmell, who captained the first flight over Erebus on February 15 1977, had established this flight altitude after his boss, Captain Doug Keesing, had made flight altitude arrangements with Civil Aviation. Keesing resigned in April 1979 after being given little to do for more than a year, as Paul Holmes recounted in Daughters of Erebus.
After the crash, Gemmell was a key player in the damage control that set like cement.
Gemmell secured special permission to go to Mount Erebus with the Chief Inspector of Air Accidents, Ron Chippendale — meaning Air New Zealand’s chief pilot had access to a crime scene. Incredibly, the Civil Aviation Division had allowed Gemmel to canvas the crash scene at Mt Erebus, and to have access to the exhibits collected at McMurdo, despite Air New Zealand’s Chief Pilot having an obvious vested interest in limiting damage to the airline. Gemmell was the key architect of the Antarctic Flights.
The DVI Squad worked according to plan, as Peter Mahon wrote, under a command structure on the watch of Inspector Bob Mitchell, who changed his story twice about pages missing from the black ring-binder diary belonging to Captain Jim Collins found at the crash site by Constable Stewart Leighton. Sergeant Greg Gilpin bagged and labelled the diary before sending off the evidence by chopper to McMurdo on Thursday 6 December. However, there was no chain of custody, meaning no exhibit forms had been filled out because Gilpin said that was not their DVI role.
In the docu-drama, Erebus: Operation Overdue, Sergeant Greg Gilpin stated NZ Civil Aviation Authority’s Chief Inspector of Air Accidents, Ron Chippendale, had instructed the police search team to seal any property in plastic bags and inventory them. They were there for body recovery and identification, not investigation.
The very next day, December 7 1979, Captain Gemmell was back at Air New Zealand House. Gemmell guardedly admitted to the Commission that he may have received the captain’s ring-binder, along with other items found at the crash site.
Justice Mahon compared Captain Gemmell to German Commander Field Marshall Erich von Manstein, who was tried at Nuremberg for failing to protect civilian lives.
Mahon described von Manstein as “probably the most brilliant army commander of the [20th] century.” For example, von Manstein countered an anticipated Allied invasion through the Netherlands, by devising an innovative operation to invade France — later known as the Sichelschnitt (“sickle cut”) — leading a swift armoured offensive via the Ardennes Forest in June 1940, rapidly driving to the English Channel, to cut off the French and Allied armies in Belgium and Flanders.
Von Manstein ‘flew’ over the heads of the German high command and gained approval for his plan directly from the Führer of Germany (1933–45), Adolf Hitler.
Gemmell is an old Bavarian clan-name. Mahon observed his “iron composure”.
The Royal Commissioner heard from Gemmell that the accident would not have happened if the pilots had maintained minimum safe altitude of 16,000 ft. Mahon stated that this inbuilt logic ‘assumed’ the pilots were aware they were headed toward a mountain, rather than over the flat sea ice that all the previous flights had followed since the course was altered in 1978. By this logic, the pilots were suicidal. Gemmell dismissed the flight coordinates and the failure to tell the crew, as virtually irrelevant issues. Gemmell’s viewpoint was consistent with the Airline’s official narrative, and that of Civil Aviation Authority, and its Chief Inspector of Air Accidents, ‘Mr Chips’.
In essence, the posture of a minimum safe altitude of 16,000 ft in mountainous terrain, and the 6000 ft minimum safe altitude once over McMurdo Sound, was a red herring argument. Such a logical fallacy occurs in an attempt to hide the weakness of a position by drawing attention away from the real issue to a related side issue, as any newsroom possessing a copy of Professor T. Edward Damer’s classic book, Attacking Faulty Reasoning: A Practical Guide to Fallacy-Free Arguments, would readily recognize.
Another character central to the ‘Mount Erebus Disaster’ was Air New Zealand’s Chief Navigator, Brian Hewitt, who was described by pilot Arthur Cooper as a mistake-prone navigator, in Daughters of Erebus, by broadcaster Paul Holmes.
It was Hewitt who made the coordinate change, in the dead of night, that sent Flight TE901 on a course to head for Mount Erebus, and who saw no need to tell the aircrew.
The original flight track in 1977 had directed the aircraft to fly over the mountainous area to the east of the Erebus summit for a flyover of the radio non-directional beacon (NDB) at 166.41° which was located between McMurdo Station and Scott Base.
In 1978, after Air New Zealand acquired a ground computer system, the flight track was changed, to fly over McMurdo Sound. This is when the 2.10° ‘error’ occurred.
Hewitt ‘thought’ he was to enter the coordinates for the Williams Field Waypoint (‘Ice Runway’) at 166.48°, instead of the NDB radio beacon, only a difference of 7 minutes longitude. But, Hewitt claimed, he hit the wrong key, and he entered 164.48° instead of 166.48°. This ‘flight track error’ of 2.1° sent the 901 route to a ‘waypoint’ at West Dailey Island, a difference of 27 nautical miles. Because the ‘error’ made the route safer, and guided the 901 flights into the Sounds along the military track used by the U.S. Air Force and Navy, no one questioned it. This track existed for fourteen months.
Complicating matters, on November 8 1979, the NDB radio beacon had been withdrawn from service, leaving only the ground navigation beacon or the TACAN (Tactical Air Navigation Aid) located at 166.58°. The routing difference of 27 nautical miles was ‘thought’ to be only 2.1 nautical miles, according to Flight Line Manager, Captain Ross Johnson, who was the flight briefing officer on November 9 and who claimed the 901 pilots were told they would be flying over Erebus, at this flight briefing 19 days before the doomed flight. The glitch was, living pilots contested him.
The alleged reason for the flight coordinate change was that a pilot rang the airline’s flight line manager after he noticed the waypoint discrepancy and suggested that the pilots be made aware of it, so that they wouldn’t get the shock that he’d experienced.
When the airline had advised flight crews on November 8 1979, that the Navigational Direction Beacon (NDB) at McMurdo was taken out of service, evidently, no one at Flight Operations, nor in the Navigation Section, noticed the destination waypoint for McMurdo Sound was located near West Daily Island, across the Sounds to the west.
Thus, with the 901 flight track altered in the dead of night to head for Mount Erebus at low altitude, the US Navy Air Traffic Control Tower at McMurdo Station would lose VHF radio communications with the doomed DC-10 from 40 miles out. That is, produce radio silence, both literally and metaphorically. While there was HF radio, this was intermittent. After its spiral descent, the DC-10 was speeding toward icy rock.
McMurdo Station also had an ASR quad radar (terminal area radar) which operated at a 360 radius at 40 miles and IFR (instrument flight rules) or SIF transponder (selective identification feature) that would alert the flight and the base as to their presence at 125 miles. Mahon was prevented from interviewing the staff at McMurdo Station.
After the crash, the airline insisted the minimum safe altitude (MSA) over Erebus was 16,000 ft and once past the mountain, the MSA would be 6000 ft once authorized by the air traffic control at McMurdo Station. But for 14 months, the flight track had taken the 901 planes down over McMurdo Sound, with Erebus on the portside.
Ironically, Captain Johnson had flown over Erebus, headed to the NDB beacon, and flew at 3000 ft over McMurdo Sound, when he captained a flight in November 1977.
This is where the unfathomable mistakes, mix-ups and mystifications at the airline that later sounded so incredible, when a proper probe into what occurred eventuated, that the “orchestrated litany of lies” to cover it all up — became truly symphonic.
Mahon suspected that Captain Johnson may have already decided to change the flight track because in his role as Flight Operations Line Manager he had written to the Director of Civil Aviation in October 1979. Johnson said he expected the next edition of the Ross Sea chart, NZ RNC4, would include a print of the TE 901 flight path.
At the Royal Commission, Johnson’s narrative would have it that he was telephoned by Captain Lesley Simpson, who asked him to get the airline’s Navigation Section to look at the position of the McMurdo waypoint on the computerised flight plan.
Johnson claimed Simpson said the McMurdo waypoint would be better positioned at the TACAN. In other words, Johnson was claiming Simpson suggested the waypoint be changed such that the flight would head over Mount Erebus. Simpson is the glitch.
Simpson, who attended the same briefing as Captain Collins, denied he had suggested a change, stating he had suggested the pilots needed to be informed of the discrepancy. Ergo, Simpson was one of the pilots still alive to challenge the narrative about the content of the November 9 flight briefing, and the flight simulation session.
Captain Lesley Simpson had flown his allotted 901 flight on 14 November 1979, or 14 days before the doomed flight. He rang Captain Johnson after his return from Antarctica to point out that he had been surprised that the waypoint for McMurdo Sound had been further away from McMurdo Station that he had expected. When Simpson approached the West Dailey Island waypoint, he realised he only needed to head to his left (or portside) to the east, and McMurdo Station was then ahead, albeit 27 nautical miles. Captain Simpson — who had attended the same flight briefing as Captain Collins and Captain Greg Cassin — told the Royal Commission he gained the impression from Captain Johnson’s presentation on November 9, or nineteen days before the doomed 14th flight, that the flight track would lead the aircraft into McMurdo Sound to the west of Ross Island, with Mount Erebus well out to his left.
Evidently, Johnson told Laurence Lawton, the Superintendent of Navigation Section that “something is wrong with the McMurdo position” — according to Lawton.
So, Lawton retrieved from the computer the original flight plan used by Captain Ian Gemmel, which had the McMurdo waypoint at 77.53 latitude south and 166.48 longitude east, the original longitude coordinates. This was not the flight plan the crews had been flying with since November 1978. Lawton admitted under cross examination that he could have retrieved from the computer the flight plan that Captain Simpson had followed to get his DC-10 to Antarctica and back, ‘safely’.
Consulting the ‘latest’ American information, Lawton and Hewitt discovered the TACAN was located at the longitudinal coordinate of 166°58’E. Since they were looking at the old flight plan, they claimed, they ‘believed’ the current flight plan was out by 10 minutes; the deviation between 48 and 58 minutes, or 2.1 nautical miles.
Ergo, the ‘McMurdo’ waypoint became 166°58’E, whereas Captain Jim Collins and Captain Les Simpson had been briefed for 164°48’E or 2.1 degrees west of the TACAN.
When it is remembered that the farthest southern position that the Ross Expedition travelled to was 77°37’ S; 166°58’ E, as Heritage Expeditions records, while the Expedition led by Captain Robert Falcon Scott, who established Scott Base, now rebuilt at 77°50’57”S 166°46’06”E — then snoop-readers can see how the coincidence clusters collided with coiling circumstances, as if a command capture occurred inside Air New Zealand, in crooked competence with Civil Aviation. And in the aftermath, a cacophony of cornered chess-pieces were cast into a criminal crony cover-up.
In effect, the good people of New Zealand were asked to believe that a flight track discrepancy sat unnoticed in the Navigation Section’s ground computer — for 14 months. But, it was only changed after it was noticed by a captain who had flown his allotted 901 flight on November 14 1979, or 14 days before the doomed flight.
Yet, curiously this ‘flight track error’ was not ‘corrected’ before the airline’s 13th Antarctic Flight. Instead, it would be the 14th 901 flight that would belly flop on the 13° slope below Fang Ridge of the volcanic mountain, that was reported at the time to have been 13,000 feet high and named after a British bomb-ship, that had collided with its companion ship, HMS Terror on 13 March 1842 in a storm. The crash was the world’s fourth-worst civilian air disaster. Why was the ‘mountain moved’ when it was?
An airliner takedown plot couldn’t work in blue skies. An overcast day was needed.
Who was the sinister force that wanted the souls to be stolen away into the maw of a monster on Fang Ridge on a mountain named after the Greek myth of Erebus, to denote the caverns on the way to Hades, or Hell: the DVD of Dachau, Germany?
Therefore, it appears the over 500 errors, inactions and omissions that led to the Erebus Crash amounted to metaphor-laden air terrorism rather than an ‘accident’
Patterns of Apparent History Riffing Lurking in the Meta-Data
The Erebus meta-data reveals curious coincidences, that appear to riff off historical events with such uncanny frequency, they seem to whistle a ‘history rhymes’ tune.
Infamously, Captain Jim Collins and his co-pilot, Greg Cassin, attended a ‘misleading’ flight briefing 19 days prior to their fatal flight, TE 901. On November 9 1979 they were led to believe the computer-programmed flight path would take the DC-10 down McMurdo Sound, over flat sea ice. Recall, on November 8 the airline had advised flight crews that the Navigational Direction Beacon (NDB) at McMurdo was taken out of service? But this change didn’t trigger any precautions like providing a navy ship to support communications. The date November 9 is imbued with a maritime metaphor.
Coincidentally, on November 9th 1769, Captain Cook, and astronomer Mr Green, made calculations from measuring the Transit of Mercury across the sun, to fix the near-precise location of New Zealand on a world chart. Thus, the date, November 9 carries an emotional potency for the ‘Erebus Families’. And the apparent plot thickens.
In her 2018 book, Lying for the Admiralty, Margaret Cameron-Ash claims that Captain Cook constructed a phantom possession ritual at Mercury Bay, meaning he created it after the fact. She notes his brief recording ends with two lines of darker coloured ink and smaller script, squeezed at the end of his customary long description of a place, its people and its politics. Cook claimed his crew cut upon a tree the ship’s name, and that of its commander and date, evidently as a proof of presence, and possession.
In her paper — “A strategy of disinformation: How and why Captain Cook concealed his discovery of Bass Strait from Britain’s rivals”, Cameron-Ash detects that Cook altered his journal, charts and logs to create phantom possession rituals, omit details of encounters and hide harbours, straits, and other details of strategic value to the British Admiralty, after he learned of a French presence in the South Pacific while in Batavia. Cameron-Ash presented her findings at the 2015 Power of Maps Conference, hosted by the National Library of Australia. Therefore, the possibility arises that the historically charged date, November 9, was chosen as a weaponized signal that an air terrorism plot was advancing toward closing the trap. Cue The X-Files theme tune.
The charged potency heightens with reference to the Antarctic Flights’ start date.
Poignantly, Captain Ian Gemmell was the pilot of the first Antarctica Flights marketed by Air New Zealand, which took place on 15 February 1977.
The day 15 February in 1882 is a well-known moment in the plucky South Pacific archipelago’s history as a colony of the Second Masonic British Empire (1815-1918).
On 15 February 1882, the Gear Meat Preserving and Freezing Company of New Zealand Ltd, Lambton Quay, exported the first shipment of frozen meat by sea.
Snoop-neurons lit up reading of this historic tale. While en route from Port Chalmers to Britain, the Dunedin’s Captain almost froze to death in the ship’s hold while sawing extra holes to improve air circulation, as the vessel was becalmed in the sunny tropics.
Gear Meat Preserving and Freezing Company boasted they supplied the Admiralty.
Therefore, there appears to be symbol sorcery encoded into the doomed flight, TE-901.
Since the first frozen meat shipment left New Zealand on 15 February 1882, it could be said that the first Air New Zealand live meat flight to Antarctica occurred in 1977.
After all, the charged potency heightens when the historical reference to the Antarctic Flights’ start date, is recalled. The first Antarctica Flights marketed by Air New Zealand took place on 15 February 1977. Since the day 15 February in 1882 became a date of national pride for nailing the world’s exported frozen meat shipment by sea, it would appear the inaugural Air New Zealand TE901 flight takes on a new spookiness.
Moreover, on the 29th Anniversary of the Mount Erebus Disaster, an Air New Zealand-owned Airbus A320 crashed into the Mediterranean Sea off the coast of Perpignan, France. The sudden demise of the Flight 888T was uncanny not only because it occurred one year ahead of the 30th anniversary; a delicate matter. This crash occurred barely a fortnight after John Key was elected Prime Minister, on 10 November 2008.
The ‘coincidental’ crash appeared to telegraphed caution. Cue Yes Minister theme tune.
And therefore, it follows by the same dark brutal logic that the first Air New Zealand Antarctic frozen meat flight took place on 28 November 1979. And, 29 years later to the day in 2008, the first Air New Zealand mediterranean shark meat flight occurred.
If it seems that Snoopman is taking the idea of a flying sardine class out beyond the theoretical limits of the possible, and into the realm of fictional Hollywood super-villains, consider that among the many metaphors scripted into the 9/11 Blockbuster Terror Theater of September 11 2001, the FBI’s counter-terrorism team was stranded in Monterey, California, due to the Federal Aviation Authority’s vacant air order.
Ironically, in its heyday, Monterey was a place for a thriving sardine canning industry.
Ergo, the FBI’s counter-terrorism team was stranded like fish out of water in Monterey from where they were due to fly back, like sardines on a commercial flight — after participating in a two-day exercise at the FBI Hostage Rescue Unit. Cue Atom Ant theme tune.
And given that the Pentagon was struck on the day of the 9/11 Coup D’état, Septmeber 11 2001, or precisely 60 years after the Pentagon’s foundation stone was laid, it is a clear and potent example of the historical riffing, symbol sorcery and psychodrama processing, that sinister transnational forces embed into terrorist theater events.
If my thesis is correct, on the night of November 28 1979 a coup d’état occurred.
The date of fatal flights’ TE901 and 888T carry historic potency as well. On 28th November 1910, the Terra Nova sailed from Port Chalmers. It would be Captain Robert Falcon Scott’s last Antarctic expedition. The ship’s name also carries potency.
Scott’s party of five died on the return journey from the pole; some of their bodies, journals, and photographs were found by a search party eight months later.
Therefore, the maritime-aviation navigation metaphor imbued in the date, November 28, carries potency. After all, the degree of Captain Jim Collins’s personal culpability in the crash of Flight 901 remains controversial, while the degree of the Air New Zealand navigation section’s culpability, in particular, was rescued by Superintendant Brian Wilkinson, who shut down the police investigation without any prosecutions.
Moreover, the demise of Flight 888T off the coast of France remains controversial.
If the possibility of deliberate historical riffing seems too ‘Doctor Evil’ and that such mechanisms to signal authorship, narrative, scapegoats, to warn, telegraph trajectory and to convey psychotic humour — would all be known to political science professors, muckraking journalists and authorities with prosecution powers, recall that Justice Mahon’s report was not tabled in NZ’s Parliament until nearly 20 years after the crash.
While his report did not touch upon the apparent historical riffs that I detect, it’s critical to recall the cover-up continued with the subsequent snuffed police probe.
Mahon believed the reason for Muldoon’s release of the ‘Chippendale Report’ — only a fortnight out from the commencement of the Royal Commission — was that the move was an attempt to protect the airline, the regulator and the Government from political attack, if the blame for the crash could be solely pinned on the aircrew.
But, remember how Mahon finished his report stating that he believed there had been a deliberate concealment of the misleading flight plan when it was transmitted to McMurdo Station. Mahon inferred someone wanted the DC-10 to crash into Erebus. He left the door open to the possibility that the crash was a takedown.
And remember that the Airbus A320 Flight 888T owned by Air New Zealand, that crashed into the Mediterranean Sea off the coast of Perpignan, France, on the 29th anniversary of the Erebus crash? This doomed flight was a handover test, or ‘acceptance flight’, on 28 November 2008 (New Zealand Daylight Time). The airbus had been leased to a German charter firm XL Airways, and had just been repainted.
This crash occurred barely a fortnight after John Key was elected Prime Minister, on 10 November 2008. Perhaps, the ‘coincidental’ crash telegraphed caution.
The demise of Airbus A320 Flight 888T off the coast of France was uncanny, not only because it occurred one year ahead of the 30th anniversary; a delicate matter.
The irony deepened in 2009, when Air New Zealand launched an ad campaign, titled ‘Nothing to Hide’, featuring airline staff posing nude, with bodypaint costumes, including the chief executive, Rob Fyfe, who played a baggage handler. Ergo, the Air New Zealand CEO would act like the airline had nothing to hide at the 30th anniversary and perform a limp-wristed apology to script. Cue the Scooby Doo theme tune.
Where Fyfe’s body was painted to cast him as a baggage handler ahead of the 30th anniversary of Erebus, Ron Chippendale’s body got mangled while out on his morning walk on February 12 2008. Chippendale was run down by an out-of control car. The police appeared to believe the driver was at fault, but didn’t seem to consider if the car was hacked and directed by remote control to plough into the former air inspector.
Ergo, the possibility that a metaphor-laden assassination to frame the blame, in effect, as ‘auto-pilot error’, appeared to be ruled out due to an apparent lack of imagination.
Coincidentally, on that day, 99 years prior, a passenger steamship SS Penguin struck a reef after setting out from Picton in clear conditions for Wellington. As the weather deteriorated, and familiar landmarks disappeared, Captain Francis Naylor set a course to steer clear of danger, changing course to ride out the storm, but SS Penguin struck rocks. And while sinking in heavy seas, life-rafts were filled with women and children, but they capsized, and 75 mortals perished. An inquiry blamed the Captain. A plaque was mounted close to the probable site to mark the tragedy at its centenary in 2009.
So, one year before the SS Penguin sinking centenary for which the captain was blamed rather than the harbour masters, the Erebus air investigator who largely let the airline and the regulator (his employer) off the hook, died in an ‘accident’ due to driver error.
Therefore, it would appear that dark humour was woven into the uncanny demise of Ron Chippendale, especially since the Antarctic Flights were marketed with penguins.
Chippendale, I contend, was a risk since on the 10th anniversary, it was reported he said Air NZ stuck to the flight altitude argument to limit its insurance liabilities.
Since the 30th anniversary of the Erebus disaster also coincided with the first anniversary of the A320 accident, Fife also spoke about Perpignan. In a 2009 letter to the Erebus families, Mr Fyfe said: “It was the experience of that accident [Perpignan] … that caused me to reflect on many of the gaps and failings that occurred in the days, months and years after November 28, 1979.” Cue Batman, guest-starring the Penguin.
The sudden demises of Chippendale and Flight 888T appear to have been signals intelligence to communicate threats to those still alive, who were associated with the cover-up of TE 901. The encoded metaphors seem to cue to those attuned to such codified messages, that pretending there was nothing to hide was a matter of self-preservation, since a sinister force is still at-large. Cue Pinky and the Brain theme song.
Especially, since the date that Rob Muldoon released the ‘Chippendale Report’ was on 19 June 1980. Spookily, the release of the white-wash report appeared to be uncanny timing, given that it was 40 years to the day that the Royal Mail Ship, Niagara sank off Bream Head, 19 June 1940, when it struck German mines. Cue Tin Tin theme tune.
Ironically, Air New Zealand’s heritage stemmed from the formation of Tasman Empire Airways Limited, which was registered in Wellington on April 26 1940, with the purpose to transport mail, passengers, and cargo across the Tasman Sea between Australia and New Zealand, during World War II. Ergo, it appears Muldoon consciously released the Chippendale’s white-wash report on the potent historic date on which the main maritime competitor to Air New Zealand’s forerunner airliner, was sunk by German sea-mines off the coast from Whangarei Harbour. Was Muldoon codifying by this report drop, that he had become privy to a German intelligence plot to crash TE901, and so, the upcoming Royal Commission required vigilant eyes?
The TE prefix was Air New Zealand’s international flight code, which reflected Air New Zealand’s origins as Tasman Empire Airways Limited (TEAL), which was formed in wartime to transport mail, passengers, and cargo across the Tasman Sea between Australia and New Zealand, with a Treaty signed between the U.K., Australia, and N.Z. on 10 April 1940. On April 1 1965, the Air New Zealand brand was ‘born’ following the New Zealand Government’s purchase of the Australian Government’s shares. The TE designation for international flights remained until Air New Zealand was sold in 1989, a fact which adds to the subtext in the ‘Erebus Disaster’ narrative.
Another curious coincidence connected with Chippendale’s death was that the police investigation was overseen by an Inspector John Spence. Is is merely chance that another John Spence, was due to be aboard last TE 901 Flight? A Captain John (Jack) Spence, an airline inspector with the Civil Aviation Division, pulled out because he claimed a family member was ill. This was unfortunate, because it was the airline inspector’s job to check the flight coordinates. Ironically, Captain Spence was aboard the first 901 flight piloted by Captain Gemmell, to check conduct and operation of the flight, as well as the accuracy of the Area Inertial Navigation System (AINS), which controlled the course of the aircraft according to the flight plan coordinates, and in communications with satellites. The AINS technology made the navigator as a flight crew member ‘redundant’. Was this ‘suss-Spence’ coincidence signalling the odd demise of the air accidents inspector, was a hit and a warning to the Establishment?
And so, when Luxon resigned his post as CEO of Air New Zealand on 19 June 2019, it was not only seven years to the day, after he was named the airline’s chief executive officer. Luxon’s tabling of his resignation was also 39 years to the day that Robert Muldoon, as Prime Minister, released a report into the collision of an Air NZ DC-10 with Mt Erebus in 1979. Since Muldoon had released the ‘Chippendale Report’ at 11:59pm on 19 June 1980, it would appear that Luxon was signalling his was ejecting from the airline’s top officer seat, before the 40th Erebus Anniversary rolled around.
Do these events that indicate potential patterns of intentional historical riffing, and that appear to be uncannily encoded with themed metaphors, actually signal that a small German intelligence ring stationed in Wellington had penetrated N.Z’.s state bureaucracy? And that since then, New Zealand’s national security state have learned to schedule shocks to capture the political and corporate apparatus?
The curious coincidences seem to riff off the realm’s historical events with such uncanny frequency, and appear to whistle a ‘history rhymes’ tune. Cue Princess Bride.
In essence, the airline had moved a mountain in front of the flight crew. It appears a metaphor was codified into the event that said, move bureaucratic mountains for the transformation of this ‘banana republic’ into a realm of the globalized super economy.
After all, the Antarctic Flights were marketed as ‘one class’ to convey the idea that the commercial civilian sight-seeing trips would erase privilege. In an apparent metaphor-laden plot, this travel class was called ‘super economy’ and appeared to reflect the psychotic humour of a clandestine group intent on repurposing the South Pacific archipelago. It’s new role would be a stage set for show-casing trojan horse resets, it seems, with each new government administration captured by a shock event.
The collision of Air New Zealand Flight TE901 on November 28 1979 looked, slinked and smelt like air terrorism inflicted to scare New Zealand’s ruling families to get on board with a desired corporate heist of the economy, which the Snoopman explored more generally in part 2 of his Lux Luthor series entitled, “High Flyers Club”.
It may also have been inflicted to act as a talisman to the Western Élites attuned to such symbol sorcery, to move bureaucratic mountains for the forging of a global super economy, or more mountains could be moved in front of flight crews — any time.
The ‘coincidences’ of the Erebus Crash also appear to be about who was saved and who wasn’t. These coincidences seem to telegraph that flight TE-901 would be the last of the Antarctic Flights and signal the end of the call-sign that referenced the old Trans-Tasman Empire Airways Limited out of which Air New Zealand formed in 1965.
A VIP passenger due to be on board flight TE-901 whose schedule was changed ‘last minute’, was Sir Edmund Hillary, who was supposed to be the commentator on the fatal flight. But, he was double-booked. And so his friend Peter Mulgrew filled his spot, while the world’s most famous mountaineer — who was credited with climbing the planet’s highest mountain, Mount Everest, first — could speak at a business conference sponsored by the American Chamber of Commerce. It was the second time the Knight Commander of the British Empire narrowly missed a fatal flight.
On December 16 1960, Sir Edmund Hillary was due to be on board United Flight 826, bound for International Airport (Idlewild Airport), but he was late after getting stuck in traffic. A Trans World Airlines-owned Lockheed Super Constellation, Flight 266, collided in mid-air with the United Airlines-owned Douglas DC-8. The New York Air Disaster/Park Slopes Air Disaster, as it is variously known, was a take-down by the COREA Group in Frankfurt, part of the Deutsche Verteidigungs Dienst (DVD), according to Shrimpton. Evidently, the DVD was set up by German spymaster Admiral Wilhelm Canaris and his deputy, General Leutnant Erwin von Lahousenin, in 1943 to 1944, after Sophie Scholl made it clear Germany couldn’t win World War II.
The alleged take-down of the TWA-United Airlines flights on December 16 1960 occurred simultaneously to President John F. Kennedy announcing that Robert Kennedy would be Attorney-General. The effect was that the airliner crash displaced the news of Kennedy Presidency’s big announcement that his brother would be attorney general, as can be seen on the front-page of the New York Times the following day. ‘Coincidentally’, the United Flight 826 Douglas DC-8 jetliner was bound for what was then officially known as International Airport, and it was subsequently renamed John F. Kennedy International Airport — after JFK was assassinated. Therefore, it would seem the German DVD had engineered the ‘TWA-UA’ collision to signal to those in the American Deep State aligned with the German DVD, that a take-down of the Kennedy Presidency was needed for their mutual self-preservation.
Shrimpton says it is easy for the DVD to cause an air crash in conditions of poor visibility, by introducing a fake radio beacon while disabling the true radio signal.
After all, Francis Richard Conolly makes an excellent case in his epic documentary, JFK to 9/11: Everything is a Rich Man’s Trick for the penetration of the CIA by Nazis, and the American Oligarchy’s deep state network criss-crossing the FBI, the Mafia and other institutions within federal and state jurisdictions. Conolly argued that John F. Kennedy had fooled mafia bosses into thinking that Robert Kennedy would cease dismantling the mafia once he was elected as president, in exchange for mafia support.
CIA Directors Allen ‘von’ Dulles and Richard ‘von’ Helms were DVD, says Shrimpton, and therefore the reprehensible JFK Assassination is more comprehensible.
And so, the Mount Erebus Disaster makes more sense, particularly when it is recalled that the governance over the Antarctic Flights by the Civil Aviation Division was lax.
Whether the Knight Commander of British Empire was saved by the ‘good fortune’ of being booked to speak at a U.S. Chamber of Commerce conference, or whether Ed Hillary was spared, the loss of a managerial level head seems potent — if I’m right.
The Tourist Department’s head, Michael Seaver Roberts, was among the dead.
I’m not saying Hillary had anything to with this possible terrorism plot.
Schedules can be arranged to move mortals into positions to fulfil fatal functions, while preserving non-expendable chess pieces to signal solidarity with ‘sovereigns’.
So, would the damage control have set in, the way it did in the immediate aftermath — with the insiders at Muldoon’s Beehive, and at the Civil Aviation Division of the Ministry of Transport, opting for a damage control report — if ‘Sir Ed got dead’?
And, at Air New Zealand House, would shredding of documents have been able to happen? Because, wouldn’t the sudden termination of a Knight Commander of the Order of the British Empire have immediately triggered officials across the realm falling over themselves to do VIP due diligence checks, that there was not fowl play?
Thus, if such a famous chess piece was extinguished so spectacularly, do you think it would have been possible for the Beehive, Air New Zealand, the Civil Aviation Division, as well as McMurdo Station, to endure the intense foreign media scrutiny?
Ergo, the Erebus Crash not only telegraphed the end for the Antarctic Flights. It appears that Hillary’s presence at a business conference in the U.S. signalled the subtext apparent in the rest of the metadata. The crash looked, smelt and slinked like a threat to the Western Élites class, to get aboard moving bureaucratic mountains to assist with forging a global super-economy, or you can go to hell on a ‘flaming sword’.
Conclusions to 45 Years Ago: Air Accident or Air Terrorism?
The apparent weaponized metaphor of ‘moving mountains’ appeared to work through fear as an encoded threat to the Establishment’s insiders, that if they did not get ‘on board’ with the envisaged corporate heist of the economy, they could be booked in for a swift spectacular end with a mountain moved in front of a witless flight crew. Or, by other kinetic mechanisms, since it seems a sinister force had confidently wielded its techno-witchcraft-and-wizardry, while the vitriol was vectorized within the vacuum of an over-arching air accident narrative. Because, Erebus was ‘too stupid to be stupid’.
Even if this terrorism scenario is incorrect, it is incontrovertible that the airline’s blameshifting demonstrated Air New Zealand’s moral compass was badly broken.
It is still broken 45 years on, because the airline’s limited ‘apologies’ of 2009 and 2019 only covered the lack of warmth extended to the grieving carrying on their lives.
The leadership of Air New Zealand have never explained why there had been such poor stewardship of the Antarctic Flight programme, or why there was an Old Boys’ Network-style closing of the ranks, that could not have worked without the cooperation of the Civil Aviation Division of the Transport Ministry, and the Beehive.
Moreover, the New Zealand Police have never come clean with the public about the investigation that was shut-down by Snr. Sgt Wilkinson, without any prosecutions.
And the Crown Law Office have never disclosed why it saw fit to facilitate such epic fraud, after an airline was obviously culpable for a crash and for covering up its part.
It may be that the real reason for such unity of criminal purpose to cover-up the ‘disaster’ was not because the tragedy was an accident. But perhaps, the brutal truth was that the crash was a take-down, and that those responsible in key places were following through on a spectacular coup d’état plan because they could not back out.
But, what happens to the moral compasses of those who watched on, like spectators?
Does it reflect an ethos steadily eroded in a society, run in accordance with a strategy to transform the realm into a set, to be a staging ground for trojan horse resets?
Have New Zealanders been processed as a ‘group mind’ to accept shocks as accidents, disasters and blunders amid moments of crisis, instead of questioning the odd facts?
In any case, I contend grown-ups of New Zealand need to ‘grow a pair’, and step into the grounded principle of Grace. A society that lacks solid principles, means grown-ups are avoiding political puberty. It is critical that humanity goes through political puberty, or a ballsy mass paradigm shift, because we are being goaded into fighting one another. Citizen journalist Polly St George makes the case for confronting totalitarianism with the ethos of Grace in her podcast, Living Under Grace Will Stop Totalitarianism. Grace is not merely about being a great dinner party host.
Grace is the principled wise ethos that trumps authority when leaders are undeserving of respect. With Grace, humans can stand firm when fear and hope are operationalized for emotional hijacking. The quality of Grace is also fierce when the land, community and household are threatened by tricksters, whether they be travelling puppet governors, psychopathic predatory philanthropists or plane-loads of jet-setting technocratic totalitarians. Grace calls upon us to be creative in reforging ourselves, our lives and our communities. It requires us to endeavour to be the best version of ourselves, to forge our superpower(s), and in doing so we contribute to the evolutionary emancipation of humanity, to rise above the division, hate and plotting.
Because, forming a Society for Fixing Broken Moral Compasses isn’t going to cut it.
’Cause it appears the spookiness of a crash site strewn with wreckage in effect also ‘processed’ the ruling families of the West as a group mind, that mountains can be moved in front of aircrews at short notice. While the wreckage remains as an eerie talisman on Mount Erebus, vast swathes of humanity suffer from symbol illiteracy.
Ergo, this hacked synthetic matrix persists because too many ‘coast along’ in naïvety.
Therefore, the 1979 Mount Erebus Disaster seems to have been an air terrorism coup d’état that set the stage for a corporate heist of the economy, and for the realm to be cast as a set, to periodically inflict novel trojan horse shocks for amplification.
* This Second Look at the ‘Mount Erebus Disaster’ was originally published 28 November 2024, on The Snoopman Files. See full Story: “Into the Erebus Abyss — Air New Zealand Flight TE901 Rabbit Hole Redux”, part 2 of the Snoopman Files series: “Terror Archipelago Down Under?”
Back when Steve Snoopman was ‘Snoopboy’, he delivered the Auckland Star during the dark days of the Reagan White House. Later he forged his superpower to ‘Thunk Evil Without Being Evil’ while writing a thesis on the Global Financial Crisis. Upon quipping that Batman failed to bust any Gotham banker balls — since his ass is owned by DC Comics — he consequently realised New Zealand needed a Snoopman.
Editor’s Note: If we have made any errors, please contact Steve ‘Snoopman’ Edwards with your counter-evidence. e: steveedwards108[at]protonmail.com
Steve Snoopman also posts on Snoopman News [at] https://snoopman.net.nz/