Four decades on from the Mount Erebus plane crash that killed 257 people, the families of the dead have finally received an apology from the Government.
On 28 November 1979, the sightseeing plane left Auckland for an 11-hour journey to Antarctica - it would never return.
Virginia, the daughter of the plane's flight engineer, Gordon Brooks, spoke to The Project about what the Government's apology means to her, and the day she lost her father.
The crash was originally blamed on the pilots, but they were later exonerated in the Mahon report, a Royal Commission of Inquiry led by Justice Peter Mahon.
In 2009, then Air New Zealand chief executive Rob Fyfe admitted the airline had made mistakes in the aftermath of the tragedy and apologised to families who did not get enough support.
On Thursday, the Government finally issued a formal apology for the Erebus crash on the tragedy's 40th anniversary.
Virginia says the apology means the world.
"I never thought I'd hear that. I thought that ship had sailed with all the politics involved. So to hear those words today, I felt like a weight had been lifted."
"Our ancestors sit on our shoulders and they were there today and for them, it would have meant a lot to have their names cleared."
Virginia was just 15 when her father was killed and she says she remembers the day clearly.
"I just felt really weird, really nervous, a really uneasy feeling. And I'm like 'what the hell is this feeling?' but, of course, the same time I had that feeling was probably around the same time they crashed," she told host Jesse Mulligan.
"As a kid, I had that fantasy you know, could they be alive and just wandering around in the snow?"
"It's hard to accept death."
She says she remembers him well - but sadly time has blurred some of her memories.
"I wish I could bring them back a lot more clearly," she said.
