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Daily Maverick

Curiosity and conspiracy take off with documentary series Helderberg

The mark of any good series is that you want to keep watching, and with access to only the first two episodes of Helderberg, it was frustrating not being able to reach the end of such a polished and thought-provoking production. It's a must watch, for South Africans especially. True crime tales and air crash investigations have an obvious overlap thanks to their core mystery. In both cases, we're immediately asking, 'What happened?' But while deep dives into murders almost always point to a definitive conclusion, aircraft incidents tend towards the more nebulous. Especially if recordings are garbled or key debris is never located. There also seems to be an unsaid rule that with air disasters, the victims should be treated with more sensitivity on screen; they're not just a name and face paperclipped to a case file. All of this means that new documentary miniseries Helderberg is a somewhat different beast from previous efforts made by IdeaCandy, the production company behind the likes of Steinheist, Devilsdorp, Tracking Thabo Bester and Rosemary's Hitlist. All of these shows delved into shocking true stories that stunned South Africa, and in that sense, Helderberg is the same, although it jumps back slightly in local history, to the final turbulent years of Apartheid. Helderberg centres on South Africa's worst-ever commercial aviation disaster, when, just after midnight on 28 November 1987, Mauritian air traffic control lost contact with South African Airways Flight SA 295 (AKA the Helderberg), shortly after it started its approach to the island, en route from Taipei to Johannesburg. Having already declared an emergency, the Boeing 747 crashed into the Indian Ocean, claiming the lives of all 159 passengers and crew aboard. Almost four decades later, no one knows the cause of the fatal fire that broke out on the plane. And that's exactly what documentary Helderberg delves into, once it's covered the timeline of events surrounding the crash, its fascinating recovery and extremely problematic official inquiry. Anyone familiar with the Helderberg story will know that there are a handful of theories and conspiracies about the disaster, and IdeaCandy and fellow production company Relish Media play devil's advocate, giving air time to each hypothesis – with the biggie being that the Apartheid government was circumventing sanctions by using commercial passenger flights to bring illicit, dangerous materials into the country for military use. To their credit, the makers of Helderberg keep a tight rein on the sensationalism, balancing it with accounts of human tragedy; the heartbreaking cruelty of fate in some instances, alongside the impressive technical details of the investigation. It's impossible not to gain some new knowledge from the series, even if it's simply because of the show's time capsule effect, transporting viewers back to yesteryear through its assemblage of news and stock footage. On that note, Helderberg is slickly made and visually dynamic, avoiding much of the repetition seen in earlier efforts like Devilsdorp. DM