Remembering New Zealand's Missing Tragedy

Monday, 9 June 2025, 5:38 pm
Opinion: Keith Rankin

Every country has its tragedies. A few are highly remembered. Most are semi-remembered. Others are almost entirely forgotten. Sometimes the loss of memory is due to these tragedies being to a degree international, seemingly making it somebody else's 'duty' to remember them. This could have been the case with the Air New Zealand flight which crashed on Mt Erebus. It was only not like that because it was an 'international' flight where the origin and destination airports were the same; and where the location of the crash was in the 'New Zealand zone' of a foreign landmass (Antarctica). So, we remember 'Erebus'.

We remember 'Tangiwai' too; Christmas Eve, 1953. And of course Napier (1931) and Christchurch (2011). And the Wahine (1968). And Pike River (2010).

The forgotten tragedy was actually a twin-tragedy; two smaller (but not small) tragedies may more easily fall below the memory radar than one bigger tragedy. The dates were 22 July 1973 and January 1974. The death toll was about 200; possibly half of that number were New Zealanders, many of them being young New Zealanders my age or a little bit older.

On Saturday I watched (on Sky Open) the first part of a documentary about the Lockerbie crash of PanAm Flight 103, on 21 December 1988. This is particularly remembered globally because, as well-as being a first-order human-interest tragedy, it involved geopolitical skullduggery. Going into the documentary – and I have yet to see the recent drama 'Lockerbie' starring Colin Firth – my understanding of the above-Lockerbie bombing of a Pan American Boeing 747 is that it was a revenge attack, following the shooting down months earlier of an Iranian airliner (Iran Air Flight 655, an Airbus A300 flying from Tehran to Dubai with 290 people on board).

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I left New Zealand for my 'OE' by ship – the Northern Star – in April 1974, just before my 21st birthday. I returned via Africa, flying via numerous stops, in 1978; many of my school-peers were just about to leave New Zealand when I returned.

I started planning about how I would travel in mid-1973. In the very early 1970s, it became more common to fly to the United Kingdom than to sail. Pricewise, 1973 was about when the fare was the same by both transport modes. Since Air New Zealand had had its Douglas DC8 aircraft, the most popular flying route was across the Pacific Ocean. It was then usual to do two stopovers – Nadi and Honolulu – on the way to Los Angeles. The main competitor airline on that route was Pan American. It mainly flew via Pago Pago and Honolulu, using Boeing 707 aircraft. But it had also just started flying to Los Angeles with just a single stop, Papeete in Tahiti.

One

On 23 July 1973, Pan Am Flight 816 took-off for Papeete. This was also the month in which the New Zealand Navy's HMNZS Otago – with cabinet Minister Fraser Colman on board – sailed into the Mururoa French nuclear testing zone; a New Zealand government protest against French nuclear testing in the South Pacific. (Ref. RNZ 7 July 2023, 50th anniversary of nuclear test protests.)

After refuelling, and presumably taking on some passengers, Pan Am 816 took off that evening (22 July, due to the date line), and crashed into the sea. It may have been overweight; although it was not full of passengers. There was one survivor, a Canadian passenger. 78 people died. No cause has ever been determined. The 'black boxes' sunk in 700m of water and could not – or would not – be recovered.

There was one famous New Zealander on board Flight 816. Geoff Perry (b.1950) was already a world-class motorcycle racer, who competed at 1972 Daytona 200 in Florida. He was a "superstar in the making". In 1971, Roger Donaldson made a short film Geoff Perry, narrated by Ian Mune. It was the beginning of Donaldson's stellar career as a filmmaker.

Two

On 31 January 1974, Pan Am Flight 806 left Auckland for Pago Pago, American Samoa. It crashed on landing. Four people survived; 97 people died from their injuries. The explanation for the crash is not very satisfactory; 'human error', it would seem.

Impact on me

I am not sure to what extent the first of these crashes persuaded me to sail to the United Kingdom, rather than to fly. I do remember at some point someone I knew telling me they had a friend on board one of those flights. There was little analysis of these crashes at the time, and even less in later years. Aeroplane crashes were more common around the world in those days, much more likely (but still unlikely!) than in this century. And 1973 had a record high road death toll that year; more than double what we get in even a bad year these days. As a society, in those times we were somewhat blasé then about accidental death. Many people my age died in motorcycle crashes; and, yes, I motorcycled from one end of the country to the other from May 1972 to May 1973.

So, even though more of my age cohort died on the roads than in the air in those years, I do believe that the 175 victims of Pan Am 816 and 806 should be better remembered than they have been. It's time to produce a docudrama – like the Tangiwai television docudrama, and the Lockerbie programmes – while there are still the memories of brothers and sisters of the young victims; young people like me heading for their lives' first great adventure.

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Keith Rankin (keith at rankin dot nz), trained as an economic historian, is a retired lecturer in Economics and Statistics. He lives in Auckland, New Zealand.

Keith Rankin

Political Economist, Scoop Columnist

Keith Rankin taught economics at Unitec in Mt Albert since 1999. An economic historian by training, his research has included an analysis of labour supply in the Great Depression of the 1930s, and has included estimates of New Zealand's GNP going back to the 1850s.

Keith believes that many of the economic issues that beguile us cannot be understood by relying on the orthodox interpretations of our social science disciplines. Keith favours a critical approach that emphasises new perspectives rather than simply opposing those practices and policies that we don't like.

Keith retired in 2020 and lives with his family in Glen Eden, Auckland.