Friday 27th March 2009  John Byers and myself were in AirWest Helicopters Hughes 500 ZK-HRA outbound from Reefton for a flight to the Corsair Site.

Once back on ‘terra firma’ we had quite a trek to get closer to the spot. We eventually set up camp and then walked to the edge of a plateau, to survey the situation and make plans of how we were going to accomplish the mission of checking the area out.

Once we had accomplished this, we cooked and ate dinner and then went to bed for the

night, ready for an early start. We were at an altitude of about 3600ft  and although I had a minus 10 degree sleeping bag, had my wooly socks and a full set of thermals on, I froze all night. John had a minus 20 degree sleeping bag and he slept like a ‘baby’- lucky him!

Next morning, after a two hour descent into the dead-ended valley below us, we were approaching the area that I had calculated the Corsair to be in. On the 1947 aerial photo that I had, it showed an area that was obviously a ridge that ran vertically down the mountain and you could see this by the white marks made by the ‘vees’ in the gull wings, gouging through the limestone ground just before it finally came to rest. The photo showed that just over this small ridge was where the Corsair was and this was in a stream. The Corsair was obviously bridging this stream as the tailplane was bent up on an angle that was at right angles to the position of the sun at the time that the photo was taken, and although it was painted a dark blue, it appeared as white in the photo .

Everything was looking good as we approached. The ridge was there, the stream was there, but there was no sign of the Corsair!

We looked for anything that could even resemble what we could see on the photo, but couldn’t find anything.

I continued to climb up the stream for about a further 200ft and came across a large bluff and at the time thought that this must have been what appeared to be it, so I descended back down to where John was and we headed back to the campsite.

On return home I downloaded the GPS coordinates onto Google Earth and found that it couldn’t have been in that position as the bluff was too far up the mountain.

While we were in Reefton, I called on Geoff Collis, a contact I have made through this website.

He is part of a volunteer group called “Reefton Search and Rescue Group” that does searches on the ‘Cold Cases’ after Search and Rescue (SAR) have given up looking.  They also help out SAR whenever needed.

They use anything available to help on their searches such as dogs that are trained to sniff out anything that is out of the ordinary in the bush.

He looked at the copy of the aerial photo that I had and immediately exclaimed, “ There’s the Corsair!”

I explained to him how we’d been into the area and couldn’t find anything, how we’d done as much as we were prepared to do physically (getting older), and if he thought it was still worth checking out further, then he was welcome to ‘go for it!’  I promised him I would give him all the help he may need  - but I’m just not interested in going back in again - My main interest has been to find the Dragonfly and these others have only been sidelines - although very important ones!

Geoff said that there were big snow falls in that area and that over the last 65 years it was not unconceivable that the Corsair could have broken up and been pushed  a lot further down the valley.

I was reminded at a latter point (by a friend) that there was also a huge earthquake in the area in 1969 so maybe it had been buried  by a landslide?

Page 1 of 2