Cautionary Tales with Tim Harford · Pushkin Industries

The Sightseeing Flight and the Invisible Mountain

March 27, 2026·40 min·3 clips

In 1979, a sightseeing flight with 257 passengers heads toward Antarctica, unaware it is flying straight into an active volcano.

The route looked sensible, until the coordinates changed. Air New Zealand's lawyers told Peter Mahon the waypoint change did not matter, because Jim Collins should have known his route crossed Mount Erebus. That was the trap. The McMurdo Sound coordinates came from what the airline called a typographical error during a move to a new computer system, missed for over a year. Later, Collins received changed coordinates, and nobody warned him. At the public hearings that began in July 1980, seven months after the crash, Mahon watched the official briefing account start to come apart. The officer who briefed pilots said he had always believed the route went over Mount Erebus. Executive pilots backed him up. Non-executive pilots told Mahon they had been briefed to fly down McMurdo Sound, leaving him with the problem he put in careful courtroom language. Someone's story could not stand. Mahon said there was a direct conflict of evidence, which the host translates as the suspicion that someone was lying. He believed the non-executive pilots. One had attended the same briefing as Collins and said printouts of coordinates from other flights had been shown there. Collins took notes. Mahon inferred that he wrote those coordinates down, then used them for his map work the night before the flight. The assumption was fatal. On the morning of the flight, Collins received the coordinates for the plane's computer and treated them as the same ones from his briefing. Why would they differ? That small question does the damage: one unchecked assumption could put a mountain where the cockpit expected McMurdo Sound.

As heard by us

A measured crash story that turns a route change into a forensic argument.

The episode treats the Mount Erebus disaster as a case study in how a route change and a briefing can harden into deadly certainty, then turn into a long fight over who understood what.

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Why you'd press play

When you want a crash story that becomes a courtroom puzzle, press play.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

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