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
I then used to easy to locate positions that I named “Track intersect” and “WAC EAST”
and calculated the magnetic compass headings from those points to the position of
the object (030°M and 270°M) as another way of locating the spot, and Terry and I
both walked the 270° heading to confirm the area. After checking out all four possible
GPS spots and finding nothing, we then checked out the stream all the way to the
bottom of the hill to where it intersected with a stream coming down from the northern
hills... still nothing!
Our GPS Tracks
From there we trekked all the way up a steep hill and returned to where we had parked
the Suzuki, had lunch and then walked the 030° heading. As we were approaching from
this direction, we came across a clearing that allowed a view through the tree canopy
of the area in question and was able to view the positions of the Punga trees/main
trees, and a Nikau tree, all visible in the 1988 aerial photo. It then became very
easy to pin-point the exact spot.
We had been using a metal detector all around the area, but the problem was that
the main expensive, high quality detector that should have given the best ground
penetration detection, wouldn’t work! Hence the only unit we had was one that only
could detect to a
