The Vickers Viscount aircraft departed from Mount Isa, Queensland, Australia for a 73-minute flight to Longreach.

The crew were unable to extinguish the fire or feather the propeller so made an emergency descent with the intention of landing at Winton, a small town along the route.

[Note 1] Two minutes later the crew notified Longreach they had a fire warning for number 2 engine and had been unable to feather the propeller.

[6][7][8] At 1:03 pm when only 13.5 nautical miles (25 km) from the airport[Note 3] VH-RMI crashed on Nadjayamba Station and was engulfed in flames.

[2] Clouds of black smoke were observed by several people on agricultural properties to the west of Winton.

[9] On the morning after the crash a team of 22 members of the Department of Civil Aviation reached Winton to investigate the accident.

The crates were transported to Melbourne, where an empty wool store was hired for the purpose of laying out all items of wreckage in their original position in the aircraft.

[10] Housed in the forward belly locker, the recorder was damaged in the crash and subsequent fire, but it provided sufficient information to allow reconstruction of the aircraft's flight path until the moment of impact.

[Note 4][13][14] The investigation eventually determined that the rotors in the cabin pressurisation blower on number 2 engine began to break up, resulting in severe vibration that loosened the nuts securing the oil metering unit to the blower and allowed oil to escape freely.

Burning oil flowed into the wheel bay and from there into the leading edge of the left wing, where the fire breached the wall of a fuel tank.

[18] The propeller of number 1 engine slashed the roof of the cabin before the detached part of the left wing separated from the remainder of the aircraft.

[6][20]When an oil metering unit was installed on a cabin pressurisation blower, locking wire was used to ensure the five securing nuts did not rotate and become loose.

The investigators believed that when the blower was last overhauled the oil metering unit may have been re-attached without locking wire securing the nuts.

[10] The investigation discovered that a couple of years earlier, fires had occurred in one of the cabin pressurisation blowers on a Vickers Viscount in Canada and another in the British West Indies.

Ansett-ANA was represented by Walter Campbell, British Aircraft Corporation[Note 7] by Gordon Samuels, and the Department of Civil Aviation by Edward Williams.