It may have been 53 years ago, but Tauranga's Nancy Morrison remembers July 3, 1963, as if it was yesterday.

The 94-year-old has every right to have that day etched on her mind, because she was possibly the last person to see National Airways Flight 441 – a Dakota DC-3 – before it slammed into the Kaimai Range near Gordon killing all 23 people on board.

Nancy Morrison was the last person to see the plane before it crashed in the Kaimai Range. Photo: Bruce Barnard.

The tragedy remains New Zealand's worst civil aviation accident – and Nancy's memory of that day has been jogged by seeing newly-released photographs of the crash scene in The Weekend Sun.

Last month, Tauranga woman Jan Hoekstra let Sun Media – for the first time – publish photographs her late father Les Elphick, a Katikati farmer and avid photographer, took of the crash scene.

An image from the crash site. File.

This has prompted Nancy to reveal she and late husband Bruce Eliot were farming on Rawhiti Rd, near Te Aroha, on that fateful day. She remembers it was a cold overcast day with strong winds.

Bruce had decided to take the children to school because of the weather and Nancy was left at home clearing the breakfast dishes.

'While I was doing my [house work] I heard this plane and I thought ‘I wonder what that was?' So I looked out the window and I saw [the plane]. So I'd say I was the only one who ever saw it on its way to where it went.

'I could just see it coming through the fluffy sort of cloud and I thought ‘I wonder what it's doing there? I've never seen one there before'. I didn't know what to do and I sort of felt a bit funny about it.”

Bruce, who was ex-air force, thought she'd mistaken the DC3 for a top dressing plane.

'I said to him: ‘No it was a Douglas', because I had been in Australia during the war and we called them a ‘Douglas' but evidentially it was a DC3. Then I heard it on the radio that the plane was missing.”

Bruce called the authorities to say what Nancy had seen. 'I remember saying to them: ‘Look behind the mountain', because I saw it heading directly for Te Aroha mountain. It was going parallel to the range. It was a really bad wind, it was a terrible wind that comes funnelling down there. You could see the plane was being buffeted.”

Eventually, Nancy had to go to the Court of Enquiry to give evidence.

As Nancy tells her story she sits on her favourite chair at her home now in Concord Ave, looking out her window she almost replicates the same scene 53 years earlier.

'You know I can still see that plane and I always will. I wish I hadn't seen it...it's just something in my memory that will never go.”