This Site is dedicated to all those families of the people that have tragically disappeared on flights in and around New Zealand. I only hope that from all the effort in building this site and from all the effort of those taking part in this venture, that it will bear fruit in bringing ‘closure’ to their memories!
Gavin Grimmer
Jenny Barratt’s theory was that they may have thought that they were at the mouth
of the Haast River, given the lights of their batches on the coast, and the lights
inland of the resort at Lake Moeraki being similar to the what is at Haast as you
come across the coast there. If this was the case, she believes that they would have
then positioned themselves for a landing not far SW of the Resort (believing it to
be the Hotel at Haast).
Jenny said they checked with the Lodge as to whether they had seen or heard the plane
at the time and they said that they hadn’t - possibly due to torrential rain on the
roof that was so noisy that they wouldn’t have been able to hear it!
Jenny described the weather that afternoon at the beach as a northerly sprung up
at around 3.00pm, at 5.00 pm it started to rain, and at 7.00 pm it became heavy rain.
She was on the beach tailing cray fish, and her husband Peter had gone out in the
boat to move the cray pots further out away from the rocks as there was a weather
front coming up from the south.
There was a story of a 5 yr old girl being very upset that her dog wouldn’t come
to her as it was eating crayfish out of a crashed aeroplane that the dog had found
somewhere in the bush close to the Whakapohai River. I spent quite a bit of time
tracking down this now adult woman and unfortunately, although she has a vague feeling
that this may have happened, she can’t say that it did for sure. Between us, we worked
out that if she did see it, it would have been somewhere close to the Moeraki River
(not the Whakapohai) and it would have been somewhere between August to November
1979, (8 to 10 months) the year after it disappeared. Being that soon after, she
may have seen “sights” that were just too horrendous for a young girl to remember,
which could well be possible, as going by the story, she seemed more worried about
her dog than the aeroplane...the aeroplane was a “non-event”. She said it would have
been her dog, “Patchy”- a brown and white Huntaway. Incidentally, she was born in
1972 which would mean that she was 7, not 5 years old as per the story.
