Gavin Grimmer
This left me in quite a dilemma as I‘d already advertised for volunteers in our Aeroclub Newsletter for those interested in searching Frasers Bush as I thought it would make a terrific Club Day doing a search for what was an airplane missing (and owned) from our Club, all-be-it 63 years ago!
I didn’t wish to take a group from our Club into a different area than where I originally thought it to be (Frasers Bush) and then waste the day when we could have spent the time more constructively searching Frasers Bush. I came to the conclusion that it would be better to check this alternative spot out first.
Thanks to Charlie Janes, I was given a permit and a key to the gate to gain access through the forestry land to the site, and on the 14th September, 2010, Chris Morris, Les O’Shea (my neighbour) and I , were in the forest attempting to find the correct forestry roads to get us as close as possible to the site.
The roads appeared easy to follow on Google Earth, but in reality it was real difficult to find them when you were amongst the trees.
Whilst traveling to the forest in Chris’s 4x4, I got him to show me where Trevor and he were when Trevor pointed to the area. I was stunned to see that where we stopped was further down the Willowflat hill than what I originally thought, and when Chris pointed to the area he said that Trevor had pointed and said, “it was over in that valley. If the trees weren’t so tall, you’d be able to see it from here!”
As you can see in the above photo, the area he pointed towards was to the left of the cliff face, not where I originally thought it was at all.
Now if you have a look at the image from Google Earth with the 1949 photo overlaid on it (shown below), and from about the same position as that in the photo above, you’ll note that you can in fact see the position of the “wreck” indicated by the yellow pin. As you can see that in 1949 most of the area up to the cliff face was open farmland.
Due to the difficulty of finding our way below the tree line, we ended up way up towards the top of a hill where we found the road was washed out, so from there it was on foot. We followed various roads that generally took us in the direction on the GPS that would take us to the site.
Eventually the road ended up going totally the wrong way so it was down to bush bashing.
You would think that in a Pine forest, that it would be easy going, but all the trees had been pruned leaving what amounted to fallen trees everywhere. This made the going very difficult and time consuming.
