Among the worst early civil aviation disasters was that of the Kyeema, a National Australian Airlines passenger plane that smashed into Mount Dandenong in 1938 when its pilots thought it was on final approach to Essendon Airport.

All 18 people on board died. The Douglas DC-2 had left Adelaide on the morning of October 25, its passengers including a federal parliamentarian, Charles Hawker, three high-profile South Australian wine makers - Hugo Grant, Tom Hardy and Sidney Hill Smith - a honeymoon couple and several barristers.

The flight crew apparently mistook Sunbury forDaylesford, putting them 30 kilometres off course before, in heavy cloud, they hit the western slopes of Mount Dandenong. A subsequent royal commission saw regulations introduced requiring flight checking officers to monitor flights, weather and alternative landing options.

Australia's worst civil aviation disaster, which took 29 lives, remains a ghastly mystery 56 years after it occurred.

Trans-Australia Airlines (TAA) Flight 538 smashed into the sea off Mackay, Queensland, about 10pm on June 10, 1960. It was a clear, moonlit night, though the plane had earlier made two aborted attempts to land because of low fog. It had circled Mackay, waiting for the fog to clear, and simply disappeared after the all-clear had been given.

No one aboard the Fokker Friendship survived the crash. An inquiry could determine no cause, despite theories about a malfunctioning or misread altimeter, and even a schoolboy spilling a bottle of model aircraft fuel, distracting the pilots.

The inquiry made the landmark recommendation that all large passenger planes should be equipped with flight recorders, known these days as "black boxes".

The TAA crash at Mackay occurred a decade after Australia's previous worst civil aviation tragedy.

A Douglas DC-4 Skymaster operated by Australian National Airlines crashed about 32 nautical miles from take-off at Perth on June 26, 1950, killing 28 of its 29 passengers and crew. The sole survivor died six days later.

An inquiry could not determine the cause of this disaster, either, though some investigators suspected water in the fuel tank.

The 1960s were to prove the worst decade for mass deaths on civil planes.

On September 22, 1966, an Ansett ANA Vickers Viscount passenger plane flying from Mount Isa to Longreach burst into flame above central Queensland, about 20 kilometres west of Winton.

The fire began in a cabin blower, spread to a fuel tank and melted a spar supporting the left wing.

The wing fell off and the plane crashed, killing 24 passengers and crew.

Two years later, in December, 1968,  another Vickers Viscount, this one operated by MacRobertson-Miller Airlines, lost its right wing in flight near Port Hedland, Western Australia.

The plane was flying from Perth to Port Hedland when more than half the wing and an engine separated from the craft, which crashed about 50 kilometres from its destination. All 26 passengers and crew perished, making it the third-worst civil aviation disaster in Australian history.

Unexplained maintenance problems were blamed.

No single air crashes have killed so many people in Australia since, though multiple deaths have continued to be recorded.

The greatest number of deaths in a single crash since the 1968 disaster at Port Hedland was on May 7, 2005, with 15 people losing their lives when a Fairchild Metroliner crashed near Lockhart River in far-north Queensland.

An inquiry found pilot error was to blame. The plane, owned by Transair Ltd and operated by Aerotopics, was approaching to land at Lockhart River Airport when it struck a ridge known as South Pap and crashed, killing all aboard.