This week the Indonesian Navy has been trying to recover some of the 162 bodies from the Air Asia flight which crashed into the Java Sea. A grim and dangerous way to end a year in which 1,320 people have perished in air crashes. The long-term global trend may be for crashes to become increasingly rare, but 2014 was the worst year for fatalities in nearly a decade.
And recovering the bodies from these disasters is one of the more unpleasant, and sometimes perilous, jobs around.
One man knows all about this. Bob Mitchell, now 73, was in charge of attempting to recover the bodies of 257 who died when they crashed into the side of Mount Erebus, in Antarctica, 35 years ago.
It was a sightseeing flight that went terribly wrong and which still attracts conspiracy theories to this day.
But the search and recovery of the bodies became the template for all subsequent air disaster recoveries, from last year’s shocking shooting down of a Malaysian Airlines plane over Ukraine to the Lockerbie disaster of 1988.
Mitchell was immediately aware of the significance of the Erebus crash. On November 28, 1979 he was an inspector in the New Zealand police force and specialist in search and rescue. He had, by chance, spent the day teaching a course in victim identification, before heading off to an early Christmas party.
“I had just got home and was sitting down to dinner when the phone went. It was my boss who told me I had better come in. “At the time it was the fourth largest air disaster in history and I knew straightaway this was going to be a biggie.”
Bob Mitchell says: "The 257 bodies didn’t bother me a great deal because it goes with the territory."
In New Zealand, search, rescue and recovery of bodies is a police job. The fact that the plane had crashed 2,500 miles away in one of the most inhospitable areas on the planet was not relevant. The plane was an Air New Zealand DC10 and the great majority of the passengers were Kiwis.
Mitchell had just a few hours to gather a small team of policeman together, collect some cold weather kit from a Polar expedition base, and fly to Antarctica on a Hercules.
While Mitchell comes across as very level headed, many of the team were overwhelmed by the scene of death and destruction they encountered, in particular, Stuart Leighton, who was just 22 at the time.
“We had no idea what Antarctica would throw at us. We just knew it would be dangerous.”
Even for the experienced policemen, the scale and the freezing temperatures were something they had never encountered.
Leighton recalls: “There was a lot of mutilation with a lot of the bodies. It was grotesque. It was overwhelming. I personally felt a little bit out of my depth.
“I had the thought, 'I don’t belong here. This is for the big boys’.”
Mitchell admits now that Leighton was probably too young to have been part of the mission.
The team leader’s main concern was not the sight of corpses scattered across the glacier -- “The 257 bodies didn’t bother me a great deal because it goes with the territory” -- but the safety of his team.
How they would cope with the sudden winds that would suddenly pick up bits metallic debris turning them into missiles that flew across the site, how they would avoid falling into the numerous fissures in the ice, how they would be able to recover 257 individual corpses, bag them up and return them to the New Zealand mortuary to be identified before the ice runway at the McMurdo station melted?
Mitchell instituted an efficient system, dividing the crash site into a grid. Each corpse, or part of a body, was numbered according to who found the victim and where they were found. “I am a chess player. So, I used the international correspondence chess method of numbering the grid of the crash site.”
He remains a very serious international chess player to this day. And it is a method still used in disaster sites. It helped the team back in New Zealand to match dental records and fingerprints with the passenger list.
After setting up the operation, he spent most of the fortnight at the McMurdo base camp – 70 miles from Mr Erebus. Meanwhile his team slept in tents at the crash site itself. Every day they would laboriously pick through the wreckage, along with the help of a team of mountaineers and photographers.
Viewers of the documentary are left in little doubt it was a gruesome job. Mitchell says: “If anything the film understates it. There is no easy way to deal with a body. You have to pick it up, put a label on it, and you have to handle it. You can’t airbrush it. And some of those bodies were very difficult to get to.”
Some had fallen down a ravine, caused by the burning engine melting the glacier. Many were difficult to put into a standard body bag. Leighton recalls: “These bodies were frozen solid. Whatever grotesque shape they landed in, that’s what they froze into.”
All of the team remember the stench of the disaster.
Mitchell says: “The smell of kerosene, jet fuel, takes me straight back to Erebus. It’s not that I get flashbacks, but I immediately remember.” There were other challenging aspects of the mission, not least the endless presence of loud and aggressive skua gulls, carrion-eating birds of the Antarctica, who kept on pecking at the corpses. The team resorted to burying the bodies again under the snow, once they had been bagged up, to stop the birds getting to them.
They were there for just 14 days but they never stopped working. The perpetual daylight of the South Pole meant that they worked around the clock, 12 hours on, 12 hours off, but never properly resting nor escaping the tragedy, even when having a meal.
Leighton says: “We had one set of gloves while we were there. They were baked with the fatty human remains, the soot, the whatever, and you ended up having to use the same set of gloves to put food in your mouth.”
It is perhaps unsurprising that the experience has severely affected the policeman, who then was just a young man.
“I remember thinking, 'Oh my God, I hope this is not going to traumatise me, I hope this isn’t going to completely screw me when I get back.’ Because I knew it had the potential to do so. And unfortunately it did.”
At the time there was very no proper counselling for the team when they returned. He has spent most of the rest of his life trying to come to terms with that fortnight.
Mitchell, for his part, says though he does not like to dwell on the past, “but there needs to be an opportunity for people to unwind. Stu Leighton’s life has been stuffed up by the fact he did not get the full opportunity to let people know.”
For all the scars some of the team were left with, it was a successful mission. Of the 257 victims, 213 were successfully identified. The Royal Commission into the causes of the crash ruled it was not pilot error but rather errors by Air New Zealand in allowing sightseeing flights to go too low and for changing the course of the flight, without telling the crew. It proved a controversial conclusion and was challenged. The police, however, were universally praised for their recovery mission.
And Mitchell is clear that air crashes, and body recovery, will remain part and parcel of modern life, despite improvements in aviation design. “The airliners are getting bigger and they still crash.”
Sunday 4 January 2014
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/aviation/11322102/Mt-Erebus-disaster-where-air-crash-recovery-learnt-its-grisly-trade.html
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