If you’re of a certain generation you'll remember the shockwaves that the crash of SAA Flight 295 in November 1987 sent through South African society. The passenger Boeing 747-200 Combi plunged into the Indian Ocean 160km east of Mauritius, killing all 159 people on board.
The questions that their loved ones and the country at large were left with would slowly become (unsatisfactorily) answered as salvage operations over the course of the next year retrieved bodies, wreckage and eventually the elusive black box cockpit voice recorder. It was the worst civil aviation disaster in South African history. The Helderberg occupied the headlines of the country’s newspapers, including this one, for years.
As director Tim Apter’s gripping new three-part documentary reminds us, each step towards finding answers and offering closure to the families of those who died only brought new questions to the surface and allowed for increasingly bizarre and paranoid conspiracy theories to emerge. The Helderberg met its fate as the geopolitical map remained in the grip of the Cold War. In South Africa, a long anti-communist intervention in Angola’s civil war was dragging on while most of the world imposed sanctions on PW Botha’s apartheid regime. The release of Nelson Mandela was still only an idea that would take more than two years to become reality and the UDF and other grassroots, anti-apartheid organisations were increasingly making the country ungovernable.
An official investigation into the cause of the Helderberg crash, led by judge Cecil Margo only served to add fuel to the conspiratorial fires when it determined that the plane had been brought down by a fire in its cargo bay, but couldn't establish the cause of the fire. In the years since, theories floated by both fringe amateur obsessives and the country’s most well-known, irascible and stubbornly dogged forensic investigator, Dr David Klatzow, have sought to locate the source of the crash within the murky context of South Africa’s Cold War activities and military intelligence cloak and dagger operations.
These theories posited that flight SAA 295 was secretly used by the apartheid government to illicitly bust sanctions by loading in its cargo hold highly flammable material for the production of missiles for the war in Angola, and that this was what had caught fire during the flight.
These theories, which moved the crash of the Helderberg from the category of tragic but explicable civil aviation disaster to collateral damage because of apartheid government subterfuge, were made with enough scientific credence by Klatzow that the Truth and Reconciliation Commission agreed to hold a special, in camera, hearing into the disaster. Though Klatzow and the families of the dead had hoped this would provide definitive answers, all the TRC was able to conclude was that its investigation raised “significant questions about the incident as well as the subsequent investigations that were conducted”, and that nothing in the inventory of the plane’s cargo could account for the cause of the fire.
The documentary series offers Klatzow and other experts their chance to explain their theories and shows that, because of the inconclusive findings on the cause of the fire, both the Margo inquiry and the TRC hearings muddied rather than cleared the waters. Surviving former aviation investigators, salvage operation team members and journalists who worked tirelessly to collect the evidence needed for the initial inquiry tell their stories and offer their opinions on what might have caused the crash.
The series also, and perhaps most importantly, offers the children and family members of those who died space to tell their stories and to describe what the effects of the conspiratorial clouds around the crash have had on their ability to find peace in the 37 years since they woke up to the terrible news.
Archive-rich with big-haired, solemn newsreader reports from the time, recordings from the black box, transmissions between the plane and the control tower at Plaisance Airport in Mauritius and patient but clear visual aids, the documentary helps viewers understand the different possible explanations for the crash. But, along with the plane crashes that killed Mozambican President Samora Machel in 1986 and UN secretary-general Dag Hammarskjöld in 1961 — and the assassinations of Swedish Prime Minister Olaf Palme in 1986 and anti-apartheid activist Dulcie September in Paris in 1988 — it remains shrouded in mystery and often paranoid conspiratorial theorising.
Apter and his production team may not offer a definitive answer that will satisfy all those who've devoted time and effort over the years to trying to answer the question of what happened to the Helderberg, but they do their best to offer a comprehensive and gripping overview and space to the idea that perhaps there may be some simpler answers that put the blame at the feet, not of the nefarious apartheid government, but rather at the feet of even more cold-hearted corporate profiteers.
- Helderberg airs on M-Net DSTV Channel 101 on Thursdays at 9pm.
