Erebus recalled

The Southland Times

Craig Saxton, who was duty executive at Air New Zealand the day of the Erebus crash, didn't have to appear before any of the inquiries, so the story of how the disaster was recognised and handled was never told. This week, he reveals exclusively to Helen Harvey what happened that day.

In the late 1950s Craig Saxton, a photographer/journalist at the Taranaki Daily News, was sent to Antarctica during the International Geophysical Year to report on various research projects on the frozen continent. He took black-and-white photos that included shots of biscuits tins outside Robert Falcon Scott's base hut.

And pictures of Mt Erebus.

Fast-forward 20 years. Journalism has made way for public relations and Mr Saxton is now Air New Zealand corporate relations director. On November 28, 1979, he was the airline's duty executive, so was on call. He arrived home from work that day a bit earlier than usual, around 5.30pm. As he contemplated having a bit of a hit at the driving range, the phone rang.

It was Movements Control – the people who monitor aircraft flights around the world. As part of the process, pilots have regular check-ins. If Movements Control doesn't hear from an aircraft, it initiates a very low level awareness alert. The Air New Zealand sightseeing flight TE901 to Antarctica had missed a check-in.

"I would have had hundreds of these [type of calls] over the years, because sunspot activity often resulted in a communications break," Mr Saxton recalls.

But this call was different. It froze him. He describes it as being like an iceberg in his heart and lungs.

"It's the only time that happened."

Movements Control said it was perfectly normal, there was enormous sunspot activity at McMurdo Sound and there wasn't anything to worry about. It had been stopping communications from the United States base at McMurdo as well.

But Mr Saxton got straight in his car and went back to work. By the time he arrived, about 6, the second check-in had been missed. McMurdo communications had talked to the aircraft earlier, so Movements Control knew it had got to Antarctica.

Mr Saxton had a list of procedures he had to follow, processes he had to set in motion. First he had to alert police and search and rescue, and to track down the airline's chief executive officer, Maurice Davis, who was running the Air New Zealand golf tournament at Heretaunga that day.

No-one had any idea the aircraft had gone down, but Mr Saxton believed the boss had to come back to the office. There was concern but no panic, he says.

"The protocols for an airline are so enshrined in procedures, you're required to do this and that, in accordance with Civil Aviation regulation protocols. It's pretty automatic."

What was the supposed landing time back here?

What possible landing spots were there if the plane had mechanical problems? When would the aircraft run out of fuel?

The amount of fuel was starting to get marginal.

"Can it get back to Dunedin? Yes, but can it get back to Christchurch? No. It certainly can't get back to Auckland."

When he finally accepted there was no way the plane could have got back to New Zealand, everyone involved started thinking about where else could it have come down, Mr Saxton says. The problem is, there is not a lot between New Zealand and the Ice. There is no-one to ask if an aircraft was spotted, he says.

"So then your options become extremely limited. They have to have come down. The logical place, first of all, would be Antarctica. By that time, they [Air NZ] had been talking to McMurdo, who had sent out search and rescue just to see if they could find anything in their territory."

New Zealand Civil Aviation had to be informed.

And all the time there was this growing sense of tragedy.

So Mr Saxton would have arrived back at his office by 6pm or so. By 7, he would have initiated all the required steps, gone through possible communications, possible points of landing and assessed fuel reserves. The flight was due back in Auckland about 7.30pm.

Media, informed the plane was late by friends and relatives who were waiting to meet passengers, had started asking questions. By that stage, Mr Saxton had briefed airport staff on what they could say: we are very concerned ... there are possibilities ... mechanical problems ... if one engine is out, they could still make it back to Christchurch or Dunedin within certain times.

Hotel accommodation had to be organised for relatives of the passengers. The names of the crew were found and executives were sent to visit the families to tell them what was happening and keep them up to date.

By 10pm, four and a half hours after the first alert, Mr Saxton confirmed the aircraft would have run out of fuel and Air NZ was now looking at an emergency. Mr Saxton simply said to the media: "You'd better come in here. This is where the action is going to be."

The phones were ringing continuously and he had to call in extra staff and telephonists. Briefings were held every 15 minutes to tell staff what to say and how to say it. By then, 20 or 30 media personnel were camped out on the top floor of Air NZ headquarters in Auckland.

At 2am, the news came through from the US naval facility at McMurdo that searchers had seen what appeared to be wreckage on Mt Erebus. There was no sign of any survivors – 257 passengers and crew were believed to be dead in New Zealand's worst air disaster.

"The worst thing was the remoteness of it."

There was no way of getting there, no witnesses, no photographs. And journalists were calling from all over the world. The media were unbelievably frustrated and abusive, Mr Saxton says. "Get us on an aircraft down there. Yeah, right. There was no way."

And for insurance purposes, he couldn't make any comment on possible causes.

"And so you have to avoid a whole lot of things."

He tried to be up-front, gave reporters any scraps of information, any developments as they happened.

"You're helpless to a large degree. Those awful feelings of not being able to do enough, not being able to do your job properly, not being able to provide the fullness of information. Disclosure is everything. People need to know and we simply didn't have that information."

Mr Saxton worked every minute for the next three days.

"Never came home, never got out of my clothes."

When he did arrive home, he was greeted with a huge bunch of flowers and a card from his three children that said "We love you, Dad."

"I can still weep, nearly 30 years later, at how much the caring meant in the awfulness of everything else around it."

In those days, the airline was a family as distinct to being just a business, he says.

Mr Saxton's wife, Anna Lise, and the other executives' wives got together each day during the next few days and cried together.

He had friends on the flight. Mr Saxton's deputy had given her husband a ticket for his birthday. She cried for three days without stopping, he says.

And then there was the blame.

In a tragedy, people have to blame someone, he says, and he was the voice of Air New Zealand, his was the only one they ever heard. "So, they blamed me. People were trying to come into the office and tear you apart."

When it came time for the funerals, Mr Saxton went to every one. But it still wasn't over. There were all sorts of residual things, like court actions, people on the aircraft who had been with people they shouldn't have been with, people on the aircraft under different names.

All sorts of repercussions.

And then there was Justice Peter Mahon's report with its "orchestrated litany of lies" comment.

Two days after the report came out, Mr Saxton called a meeting of all senior Air New Zealand staff.

"I said: We are being called liars. I can't do my job if we are.

"I'm stating facts as I know them, but I'm responsible for the company's reputation. Is there anybody here who could be said to have softened the truth, manipulated it in any way, that could give some justification to the phrase `orchestrated litany of lies'? There wasn't."

He went round every person in the room and said "In your areas of responsibility, was there any evidence you have given that could be producing this kind of reaction? No. No. No.

"I had to know everything. Literally. And there were also other things, which I don't think should be aired now."

When pressed, he had no further comment.

He is telling his story now because his three children, aged between 38 and 48, have started asking him about about it. They wanted him to write the story down. And the story of his life.

His life started in New Plymouth.

It was perhaps inevitable he would be a journalist, despite attempts otherwise. His father, Don Saxton, was editor of the Taranaki Daily News for more than 30 years.

The family lived in Victoria Road and in those days, the editor stayed in bed until 10am, Mr Saxton says.

"Dad would come home briefly at six at night and go back at seven and put the paper to bed. It would be one in the morning before he came back. That's how I grew up, so the last thing I wanted to do was to do that."

Instead, Mr Saxton went to university with the intention of joining Foreign Affairs, but discovered he needed three languages. Back in New Plymouth, he started at the Daily News in 1955.

"I became a photographer first, because I believed the best journalists capture the action and give photographic backgrounds for the story."

But there was no money in journalism, he says, so he got a job as a speechwriter for a couple of cabinet ministers in Wellington. PR work followed, first in Australia then in New Zealand.

One day in 1970, Mr Saxton saw an advertisement for a personal assistant to the chief executive of Air New Zealand. Personal assistant didn't mean the same as it does now – it wasn't a secretarial job.

"You're a corporate right-hand man."

It was the best job in the world, he says. But his journalism career caught up with him and, after a short while, he was being asked to write this report or write that speech.

"You get thrown back into it whether you like it or not. Then they said, `Why don't you take over the corporate relations division of the company?'."

Each day, there was an executive in charge and if anything happened, he would be the first point of call.

He might get advice that an aircraft has blown a tyre in Honolulu, or a storm has meant passengers are holed up in a hotel in Los Angeles.

"You know there is going to be media inquiry and you also want to reassure people everything is okay, and so there's a communication facility between you and engineering: When can the repair be effected, what's involved, is there any need for air inspection?"

On a normal day, media would start calling at 6am and go on until 11am.

One day, Mr Saxton went on a scenic flight, an 11-hour round trip from Auckland over Antarctica and back. When the captain of the DC10 took the plane down to a very low altitude, Mr Saxton was able to see the biscuit tins still outside Scott's hut.

On the first anniversary of flight TE901 going down, everything was relived.

"Every year, I get to hear my voice make the original announcements. National Radio plays the original tapes time and time again."

It has had a massive impact on his life, he says. He never had high blood pressure before Erebus.

"It shakes you. Your mortality becomes sharpened, you look at life differently. You accept the fragmented nature of it.

"Do it now. All those people, most of them would never have known – standing up there with glasses of champagne. You're having a real party and everyone is getting on great, then suddenly, bang."

He's not going to any 30th anniversary commemorations.

"You live with it and you acknowledge it having an enormous impact on your life.

"You acknowledge the responsibilities you had at the time to try to make suffering less for people. But you don't want to revisit it."

Mostly, he tries only to remember the flowers his children gave him. – Fairfax