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
We could continue to speculate what may have happened, but to shorten the process,
there are three facts that come into play here:
1/An aircraft motor was heard NE of Ryton Bay, Lake Coleridge.
2/ A plume of smoke was seen that appeared to be behind Mt Torlesse
3/ Ryan and Cessna 180 ZK-FMQ are still missing.
If we align these up with the scenario I have provided here, then we can find a highly
probable area worthy of a search area by overlaying the “smoke seen direction” over
the “West Melton track” probability, as seen here:
Using this area, this scenario, and going by what little evidence I have at this
point of time, I would estimate that the area shown below needs a good thorough search,
which of course includes the rivers and streams, and anywhere else an object could
have moved down to over the course of time, below this area.
I realise that there is a lot of tramping parties tramp to the top of Mt Torlesse
and some may have seen something and not realised the importance of it, but I don’t
believe there will be much sign of anything anyway after 14 years. This is based
on knowing that if there was a fire as attributed to the smoke, then all that may
have escaped being melted down would be possibly wing tips and maybe the tail. ZK-FMQ
also had an Emergency Locator Transmitter (ELT) on board and as no 243/121.5 transmissions
was heard that day, we can only assume that this was caused by one or more of the
three faults that happen with these beacons.
1/ The aerial becomes detached in the prang.
2/ In a high speed impact, they shatter into pieces.
3/ In a fire they melt.
