Judgment on Erebus: A Notorious Air Disaster on Antarctica's Mount Erebus Tests a Nation's Conscience - Hardcover

Sheehan, Joey

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1647046629 ISBN 13: 9781647046620

Publisher: Canterbury Books, 2024

Synopsis

Judgment on Erebus is narrative nonfiction at its most compelling and unsettling.

Commanded by one of Air New Zealand's most meticulous and cautious pilots, a sightseeing airliner inexplicably crashes into an active Antarctic volcano in broad daylight, causing the world's fourth-worst aviation disaster. The New Zealand government's Office of Air Accidents Investigation soon publishes an official report attributing the disaster to pilot error. Skeptical, an aroused public demands an "independent" official inquiry. Realizing that he badly needs a second investigator to confirm the first one's findings, an imperious Prime Minister selects for the post a distinguished High Court judge he believes will be a team player.

After conducting his own extensive inquiry into the crash, though, Justice Peter Mahon reaches a verdict on the cause(s) of and culpability for the devastating loss of life on Mt. Erebus that is totally incompatible with the government's earlier in-house report. All hell breaks loose. One of the two official investigators must be gravely mistaken-or lying-but which one and why? Years of political, legal, and judicial pyrotechnics commence to answer that question. Meanwhile, a stricken nation mourns its 257 dead.

Sheehan takes a fresh look at Mahon's evidence for concluding that the national airline itself was responsible for the tragic loss of life, which the government immediately tried to cover up with a well-organized, multi-tentacled, multi-phased, and aggressive attempt to pin the accident on the well-respected dead pilots. She also movingly relates what befell the judge after an enraged Prime Minister turned on him. This twist gives a superb political and legal thriller its moral center: a Goliath-against-David struggle over the truth.

About this title

About the Author

Joey Sheehan trained as an intellectual historian of China at Harvard University, from which she obtained her PhD, at which she taught, and with whose press she published her first book. That book established her reputation as a tenacious researcher as well as a gifted writer.For years, Sheehan has had a consuming passion for air disasters and aviation safety. Her curiousity piqued by a seemingly inexplicable 1979 catasrophe in Antartica she learned about by chance around 2014, she decided to explore whether it would make a promising subject for a new book. She concluded it would. Joey lives on the East Coast of the United States with her husband, AI. Gibbons, and a white ball of fluff named Valentino Ignacio de Villanova.

Edition details

• Publisher: Canterbury Books
• Publication date: 2024
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1647046629
• ISBN 13: 9781647046620
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 404