![]() Later that morning Greg and other DVI-trained officers - including Lower Hutt Constable Stu Leighton - met at Wellington Airport. The training included practice with dead sheep, at the Rifle Range in Trentham. However in his favour was Disaster Victim Identification (DVI) training, introduced months earlier after a fatal train crash in Australia which prompted recognition of the need to handle disasters with multiple fatalities. He’d wondered whether he might be called on, but thought his lack of snow and ice experience might rule him out. Then at 3am he was phoned to say the plane had been found on Mt Erebus, there were no survivors and he was on standby to go down. ![]() Many New Zealanders, worried about the missing flight, didn’t sleep much that night, Greg included. The sightseeing flights had started two years earlier, leaving Auckland in the morning to spend a few hours flying over the Antarctic continent before returning to Auckland via Christchurch in the evening. He’d worked a late shift at Wellington’s Taranaki St station on 28 November 1979, during which his senior mentioned an Air NZ DC10 was overdue on a flight to Antarctica. Words: Frances Ross, Ten One / Photos: New Zealand Police Museum collection (unless otherwise stated)įorty years ago this month, Sergeant Greg Gilpin took an early morning call which would come to define not only the next two weeks but a large part of his life. This series is dedicated to them and all who served on Operation Overdue to the mountaineers and US Navy photographers who worked with our people on Mt Erebus the pathologists fingerprint technicians dentists embalmers photographers and Defence Force personnel who worked alongside Police staff on the mortuary phase and to partners and families who have also lived with the effects of this tragedy. ![]() These stories would not have been possible without the generous co-operation of those who shared their often troubling, sometimes painful, memories. This is the first of a series of four stories commemorating Operation Overdue, the New Zealand Police response to the crash of Air NZ Flight TE901 in Antarctica on 28 November 1979.
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