Gavin Grimmer
I originally had the transcript of the final transmissions between ZK-HNW and Milford shown on this page, but due to the possibility that it may have been in breach of New Zealand Legislation, I have removed it it be on the safe side. It is not my intention to end up in the Courts just from trying to help people! I apologise if it makes some of the rest of this topic a little hard to follow, but it is beyond my control....
Going by the information transmitted to Milford from ZK-HNW, the only scenario that seemed to fit the whole picture of these transmissions was that HNW was in fact West of Milford.
I had originally placed on Google Earth, placemarks showing all the positions of the reported sightings and hearings of a helicopter on the morning that HNW went missing.
The Police at the time commented that each observation, and the times of those observations, appeared to contradict each other and gave no clues to finding HNW. If anything, they only seemed to confuse the issue.
With them all laid out on Google Earth it appeared that there had to have been lots of helicopters flying in all different directions.
I gave up on trying to work out the movements of HNW from these reports at that point as there appeared very little to go by, and concentrated on the transmissions.
Recently, I went back to have another look at those placemarks and found that they had disappeared off my computer!
I then had to start again going over each report and placing the relevant information on Google Earth except this time I added arrows showing where the helicopter was seen and the direction and distance it travelled according to each report.
Experience has taught me that you can’t take too much notice of the times that each person believed they saw the aircraft as they are trying to remember something that was a non-event at the time.
In one case, the person was absolutely adamant that he had the time right, but going by his own statement of what he did at the time, proved that his timing was virtually impossible!
This is a snapshot of what I ended up with shown on Google Earth.
The arrows in red were actual sightings and the blue arrows are just “hearings”:
Starting at Howden Hut, I then drew a track that seemed to fit to the sightings and then came up with this scenario:
HNW took off into wind heading into the Hollyford and then returned past the hut. The various reports from the people in Howden Hut of the time it took to return vary from 30 seconds to 2 minutes.
It appeared that Cam had a quick look into the Hollyford, saw the cloud was low and so decided to head back to Queenstown via the Greenstone Valley - a good decision to make in the circumstances.
He was next heard at Sly Burn Hut, further down the Greenstone Valley and the natural way for him to go from there would have been to head around the corner into Lake Wakatipu, as the other way would have taken him into higher ground.
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