A piece of New Zealand aviation history has been sitting in cardboard box for more than 50 years. And for the first time, Tauranga woman Jan Hoekstra is letting SunLive give the public a chance to see it.

Sadly, July 3, 1963, is a date which will go down in New Zealand aviation infamy – it was the day the country's worst internal civil aviation accident took place – right here in the Bay of Plenty.

For the first time in more than 50 years, Tauranga woman Jan Hoekstra is letting SunLive give the public the chance to see ‘never-before-seen' photographs of the Kaimai plane crash. Photos: Jan Hoekstra

Twenty-three passengers and crew lost their lives after National Airways Flight 441 – a Dakota DC-3 (ZK-AYZ) – slammed into the Kaimai Range near Gordon.

Jan says her late father Les Elphick, a Katikati farmer at the time of the fateful crash and an avid photographer, decided to hike up the rugged terrain to take photographs of the crash site.

Respectfully, he waited until the bodies had been removed and authorities had completed their investigation of the site.

The eight photographs Les took show the mangled wreck of the Dakota – and they've sat as slides in a cardboard box for more than five decades.

It was only when Jan read a recent SunLivearticle acknowledging the 53rd anniversary of the crash this year that she remembered they were in a box in a wardrobe.

'My dad was an amateur photographer and when he died he left me boxes of slides. He took a lot of photographs of us kids, but he loved the bush and waterfalls and all those sorts of things.

'I've kept all the photographs of family members; and for some reason I kept these eight slides. I kept them with the family slides in a dark box all these years until recently when I decided to digitise the childhood memories.”

At the time of the crash Jan was only a toddler and doesn't remember a lot about it. But she recalls the story of her dad going to take the photographs.

'I only know what I have read in the papers about the crash. My dad was a local farmer on Sharp Rd.

'He enjoyed bush hiking and photography. I was only little and we never really talked about it. He kept his memories to himself, as you did in those days.”

A Court of Inquiry records show the aircraft took off from Whenuapai Airport bound for Wellington via Tauranga, Gisborne and Napier. It never made it to Tauranga, slamming into a ridge on Mount Ngatamahinerua in the Kaimai Range.

The plane had flown into a vertical rock face. Fire had destroyed almost all of the plane wreckage, and 22 of those on-board died instantly. One person survived the impact but died soon after.