long-time friend and climbing companion, Peter Mulgrew, stood in as guide. The flights usually operated at about 85% of capacity; the empty seats, usually the ones in the centre row, allowed passengers to move more easily about the cabin to look out of the windows. The aircraft used on the Antarctic flights were Air New Zealand's eight McDonnell Douglas DC-10-30 trijets. The aircraft on 28 November was registered ZK-NZP. The 182nd DC-10 to be built, and the fourth DC-10 to be introduced by Air New Zealand, ZK-NZP was handed over to the airline on 12 December 1974 at McDonnell Douglas's Long Beach plant. It had logged more than 20,700 flight hours prior to the crash. Captain Thomas James "Jim" Collins (45) was an experienced pilot who had accumulated 11,151 flight hours, including 2,872 hours in the DC-10. First Officer Gregory Mark "Greg" Cassin (37) had accumulated 7,934 flight hours, including 1,361 in the DC-10. Flight Engineer Gordon Barrett Brooks (43) had 10,886 flight hours, including 3,000 in the DC-10. Also on board were First Officer Graham Neville Lucas (39) and Flight Engineer Nicholas John "Nick" Moloney (44). Flight Engineer Moloney had a total of 6,468 flight hours, including 1,700 in the DC-10. Accident Circumstances surrounding the accident Captain Collins and his co-pilot Cassin had never flown to Antarctica before (while flight engineer Brooks had flown to Antarctica only once previously), but they were experienced pilots and were considered qualified for the flight. On 9 November, 1979, 19 days before departure, the two pilots attended a briefing in which they were given a copy of the previous flight's flight plan. The flight plan had been approved in 1977 by the Civil Aviation Division of the New Zealand Department of Transport and was along a track directly from Cape Hallett to the McMurdo non-directional beacon (NDB), which, coincidentally, entailed flying almost directly over the peak of Mount Erebus. Due to a typing error in the coordinates when the route was computerised, however, the printout from Air New Zealand's ground computer system that was presented at the 9 November briefing corresponded to a southerly flight path down the middle of the wide McMurdo Sound, about to the west of Mount Erebus. The majority of the previous 13 flights had also entered this flight plan's coordinates into their aircraft inertial navigational system and flown the McMurdo Sound route, unaware that the route flown did