TAA's director of engineering, John L. Watkins OBE, accepted the aircraft, registered VH-TFB, at the Fokker works near Schiphol Airport, Amsterdam, on 6 April 1959.

The aircraft was christened Abel Tasman after the Dutch explorer who was the first European to reach New Zealand, Tasmania, and parts of mainland Australia in 1642–1644; the acceptance ceremony was attended by the Australian ambassador and his wife, Sir Edwin and Lady McCarthy.

On the late afternoon and evening of Friday, 10 June 1960, VH-TFB was flying TAA Flight 538 from Brisbane to Mackay, with stops at Maryborough and Rockhampton.

The aircraft arrived at Rockhampton Airport at 7:12 pm, where the crew received the weather forecast for Mackay, predicting shallow fog patches.

VH-TFB was refuelled to 700 gallons, giving sufficient range to continue on to Townsville if fog made it impossible to land in Mackay.

A few minutes later, having come to the spot where he would start descending, Captain Pollard told the tower controller he would hold over Mackay at 13,000 feet (4,000 m) in case visibility improved.

Five hours after the accident, at about 3 am on the morning of Saturday, 11 June 1960, a searchlight-equipped motor launch found items of wreckage, including damaged passenger seats, clothing and cabin furnishings, floating on the ocean between Round Top Island and Flat Top Island, five nautical miles due east of Mackay Airport.

[citation needed] Another possibility was posited by TAA's director of engineering, John L. Watkins OBE, who was intrigued by a mysterious brown glass medicine bottle discovered in the wreckage of the cockpit.

Watkins theorised that one of the schoolchildren on the flight may have been an aviation enthusiast, and had been shown into the cockpit whilst handling a bottle of model aircraft fuel.

He formed the view that at the third attempt to land, the crew adopted a low flight path hoping to keep the airstrip in sight below the cloud layer, but were deceived by the difficulty in assessing height over a glassy sea and put the left wing tip into the water turning onto the runway approach.

One of the recommendations made by the Board of Accident Inquiry was that passenger-carrying aircraft of the size of the F-27 and larger should be equipped with flight data recorders.