Gavin Grimmer
Richard Waugh recorded in LOST (page 136) Paul Powell’s research that an aircraft
was heard above cloud for an estimated 10 minutes and a Station Hand “behind the
woolshed heard it flying towards Mt Niger” (Niger Peak). “Dave Thompson heard it
from above the old MacPherson homestead site in the West Matukituki. He looked at
his watch and noticed it was 11:50am.”
It needs to be remembered that watches in those
days were of a ‘wind up a spring’ type and not that accurate, but by my calculations
ZK-AFB should have been over there, given the course shown, as somewhere around 11:53am...
not bad!
Interesting that I also came up with the same time of 11:53 am in my book TRACED
(page 30) on a calculation of a direct route using the forecast winds. This can
be explained simply as although it was a longer distance across to the West Coast
and down to Aspiring, there was lighter winds giving a higher ground speed.
When
you take the direction that two of the witnesses said it went – one was towards Shotover
and the other towards what is now known as Niger Peak. Depending on where these observers
were at the time of observing would indicate which direction it actually went, but
there is another possible way of determining this.
Several years ago, Paul Beauchamp
Legg told me of an occasion where he came across Brian Chadwick at Queenstown Airport
a few weeks before Brian’s disappearance.
He said Brian was rather shaken up as he
said he had been caught above cloud and made it in to Queenstown with virtually no
fuel left in the tanks! Paul unfortunately didn’t enquire further.
This attracted
my interest, because like many things in life if you get away with it once, it becomes
very easy to try it again...
I thought about this for a long time wondering what would I do if it happened to me. It would be absolutely futile just flying around until the fuel ran out as then you had no option but to come down through the cloud and take your chances of where you might end up... and in Chadwick’s case probably into the side of a mountain! What a scary thought... Even if you did find a place to land, you then would probably have a very long walk to get more fuel, hence the best thing to do I concluded would be to make a decision while you still have enough fuel to make it to an airfield and take your chances using the best information and course that may take you clear of things to bump into. Now days we are privileged with knowing exactly where we are using a GPS, but Chadwick had none of that in 1962.
Initially, I thought maybe he had lined a couple of known mountain peaks up that the map showed would take you into a clear valley, take a compass bearing between the two, fly over the furtherest peak and descend keeping a heading using the compass. Chadwick had an instrument rating but obviously not permitted to fly on instruments in the mountains... the same for the Dragonfly – not rated to be flown under IFR (Instrument Flight Rules).
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