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On March 13, 1967, a South African Airways passenger flight crashed into the ocean while approaching East London.

All 25 people aboard South African Airways Flight 406 (often referred to as the Rietbok crash) died and for more than five decades, rumours of nefarious happenings have made it one of the country’s most scrutinised aviation mysteries.

The wreckage could not be found, sabotage related to taking out passengers who were opposed to the apartheid government was a source of great speculation, and the truth remained elusive.

Enter Wouter Botes, producer of the television series Plane Wreck Hunter: Finding the Missing, and a team of divers who found the wreckage last week.

City Press reports:

Botes says he found the wreckage at a depth of 68.4m in very deep sand near East London’s Kayser’s Beach.

His discovery also disproved the sabotage theory, showing that the plane had not plummeted into the sea on the orders of government officials in order to exterminate two passengers they considered dangerous, but for far less sinister reasons.

Botes has spent the past three years exhaustively researching the crash and where the wreckage may have been located.

There are two debris fields and in time, he hopes to salvage a piece of the plane to be displayed at the East London Museum.

The below photo, taken in March 1963, shows the Rietbok plane shortly after it was purchased by the SAA from Cuban airline Cubana.

With regards to what caused the crash, Botes says he knows precisely what occurred:

The bad weather on the night of the accident would have meant that the air pressure at sea level was lower than usual, he explained. As a result, the plane’s altimeter would not have been giving the correct reading.

Image: SAA Museum Archives

In normal circumstances, when a pilot encounters stormy conditions, he is expected to recalibrate his instrument manually, with the help of the control tower. However, the recordings between the control tower and the plane on the night of the crash indicate that this never happened.

Commanding officer Captain Gordon Lipawsky failed to ask the tower for an accurate reading when he did the recalibration.

As a result, he was actually flying far lower than he realised. Known to aviators as the “black hole” effect, an attempt to turn left towards the East London airport resulted in one of the wings touching the ocean surface

Botes believes that the rest of the aircraft then hit the water instantly. The impact caused the front of the cabin to disintegrate and seawater flowed into it.

The violence of the water probably caused the cabin to burst open, spewing out everyone on board.

In a situation like the one Botes describes, the entire crash ordeal would have lasted a mere 10 seconds.

Two eyewitnesses, Mr and Mrs Ford of Kayser’s Beach, said they watched the plane fly lower and lower before a headland obscured the moment of impact with the water.

An excellent post on The Casual Observer also details an eyewitness account by Colin du Preez, a farmer about two kilometres inland from the beach:

He watched almost mesmerised as the aircraft sank lower and lower until it disappeared from sight. Simultaneously with the disappearance, they heard a sound “like a thunderclap.”

In addition, what he was able to add which was of more importance, was that there were no indicators that the plane was in trouble and that the engines noise indicated that they were operating normally.

That same post goes into great detail discussing the various conspiracy theories as well as other information surrounding the crash.

It’s worth a read in full if you want further details.

[sources:citypress&casualobserver]