On 27 November 1987 at 14:23 UTC, South African Airways flight 295 departed from Taipei to Johannesburg via Plaisance, Mauritius with 159 souls on board.
The plane never arrived in Mauritius.
At 23:48 that night the captain of the aircraft reported to Plaisance that he had smoke in the aircraft. This started a 19-minute nightmare for the crew and their passengers which ended with the aircraft crashing into the Indian Ocean at 00:07 UTC on 28 November 1987.
A shocked South African nation woke that Saturday morning to the news of the missing airliner. It was South African Airways' worst air disaster. This accident occurred during a turbulent time in South African history when P. W. Botha's apartheid National Party ruled, and the country's military was embroiled in a war on the Angolan border.
It was against this background that the South African Government, South African Airways, and the South African arms manufacturer, Armscor, were accused of illegal sanctions busting by using passenger aircraft to smuggle arms and ammunition into the country with the government's approval.
The South African Airways Investigation Board (SAAIB) determined that the crash was a result of an uncontrolled fire, but what caused the fire was unknown until a Boeing fire expert made a wildly speculative assumption naming ammonium perchlorate as the possible culprit. An apparent missing tape and bungling attempts by the SAAIB to block parts of the CVR have helped create the conspiracy that has plagued this accident for thirty-seven years. Many people, including family members, former SAA employees, and even South Africa's foremost private forensic scientist, are convinced that because of specific words on an unofficial cockpit voice recording transcript that a 'first fire' took place two to three hours after the plane took off that fateful night.
Specific words on an unofficial cockpit voice recorder transcript, an apparent missing tape that may not even exist, from accusations of state-sanctioned murder to a crew who flew a plane full of corpses for over seven hours, and many other unfounded theories have helped fuel a conspiracy for almost four decades.
This book looks at these accusations with a more logical eye by using the reports supplied by experts at the time of the accident.
This book will present an alternative view of the conspiracy that has dogged this accident since 1987, with the help of experts in aviation, psychology, fire engineering, and medicine and two of the investigators who took part in this investigation.
And then you can decide...Is the Helderberg Conspiracy Fact or Fiction?