"A hunter and his friend were hunting on Nimitz Hill during the night of August 6, 1997. The hunter said he heard the airplane first before he saw it. It was extremely loud and was so close it caused the ground to vibrate.

"He said the noise was so loud he could not hear himself screaming at his friend. He said the airplane passed over him approximately 8-10 feet above him in a descending right-wing-low attitude. It appeared as if the right wing was almost touching the ground.

"The shock of the airplane passing over caused the hunter to fall over backwards, and the noise from the plane caused him to be deaf for over an hour. He said the airplane looked huge as it approached and he thought it was going to hit him.

"He could see the wingtip lights flashing and could see the lights of the cabin windows as it passed."

The image of a fully-laden Boeing 747 jet coming straight at you in the middle of an otherwise calm night, and missing you by less than three metres, is hard to shake. On board were nearly 300 people apparently blissfully unaware of their impending doom less than half a second away. Like all air passengers, they had implicit faith in their pilots.

The report continues:

"It appeared as though the plane did not hit the ground until very near where it came to rest. The hunter said he was standing approximately 200 feet from where the airplane came to rest. He said the noise, ground vibration and shock of the closeness of the plane caused him and his friend to ‘almost return to caveman days’.

"He said they couldn’t talk or hear and were unable to communicate. He said he thought he was going to die when he saw the plane approaching. When the airplane hit the ground it seemed to nose in. There was a big ball of flame and a shock wave that knocked him over again. The flame burned very big and very bright then continued to burn. The ground shook from the impact when it hit.

"The hunter said he and his friend were almost unable to walk. They would run and stumble and crawl on hands and knees. He continued to run and fall, running toward the Nimitz Hill road…"

It wasn’t the first major disaster to hit Korean Airlines, and it probably won’t be the last. But for five months after the crash, Air New Zealand continued to code-share seats on Korean Airlines flights out of Auckland, meaning that people buying Air New Zealand tickets to Korea sometimes found themselves travelling on a Korean Airlines plane. Yet Korean Airlines would subsequently be determined as one of the most unsafe airlines in the region. Air New Zealand did later cancel the code-sharing, but that was because it pulled its own flights out of Korea because the Asian economic crisis caused a drop in travel.

Should Air New Zealand have continued booking its passengers onto KAL flights while that airline’s safety was under investigation? Hindsight makes for 20/20 vision, but it is worth noting that another KAL jumbo crashed a year later, prompting such widespread concern in the aviation community that Delta Airlines, Air Canada and the US Defense Department all bailed out of relationships with KAL.

Air safety is a subject that creates emotional responses in both passengers and airlines. Airlines all believe they are safe operators, and resent questioning of their standards. And passengers rely on assurances from Civil Aviation authorities around the world to give them comfort that when they buy an air ticket they’re not playing Russian Roulette.