Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern offered an official apology yesterday on the 40th anniversary of New Zealand’s worst peacetime disaster, the Mount Erebus air crash in which 257 people died.

An Air New Zealand DC-10 on a sightseeing flight over Antarctica slammed into remote Mount Erebus during “whiteout” conditions on the frozen continent on November 28, 1979, killing all on board.

“That loss, in and of itself, was huge. It sent ripples across the country... but that loss and grief was compounded. It was undeniably worsened by the events that followed,” Ardern told a commemoration service in Auckland.