Fiji authorities and citizens were in total shock in 1979, when the country had its first major aviation disaster that killed nine people.
This was when a Fiji Air Islander plane crashed on a hill near Bua airstrip on July 14, 1979.
A search for bodies ended the same day when villagers discovered the mangled plane scattered on a hill, six miles north-east of its intended destination.
The eight passengers and Captain Gary Cope, the Australian pilot, “all seemed to have died instantly”, the director of Civil Aviation, Mike Varley, told The Fiji Times of July 15, 1979.
A police party from Nabouwalu was deployed immediately afterwards to stand guard over the crash while bodies were slowly brought out by helicopter from the hills to Bua, from where they were airlifted to Suva.
The doomed twin-engine aircraft departed Nausori on the morning of Thursday, July 14, and was supposed to arrive in Bua 40 minutes later.
It never did. Villagers near the wreck site said they heard the sound of an approaching plane in the misty hills of Bua just before the crash.
They ventured out into nearby forests in search of survivors once they got news from authorities that a place had crashed.
Mr Varley said once villagers were able to locate the wreck, they lit a signal fire which was later spotted by two boys who in turn informed the police.
At the wreck site, the helicopter homed in on the signal fire and landed on a pad of land the villagers had “cut out”.
Its crew later confirmed all on board the plane were dead. It would take another 20 years before a similar crash was reported in Fiji.
The Air Fiji PC121 flight crashed on July 24, 1999, while travelling from Nausori to Nadi, almost exactly 20 years to the day of the first air disaster.
Seventeen were killed, 15 passengers and 2 crew, when the plane they were travelling in crashed into a mountain near Delailasakau in the Naitasiri highlands.
Between the two hill crashes, on December 27, 1986, a Sunflower plane, crashed while making an attempt to land at the Nadi Airport runway, killing 11 people on board.
Both pilots and nine passengers were killed while three others were seriously injured.
