Gavin Grimmer
Update 4 December 2023
I realise quite a bit of of this update was covered in
my last update, but to help you understand we need to go back over it so that hopefully
you can grasp the full picture of what I am trying to portray... There is also more
information added in that article to help do this.
I have had huge difficulty with my program I write this website in, mainly due to
all the extra security needed to combat the security breaches happening on the Internet
these days exceeding the capabilities of the program. At one point I thought I was
going to have to abandon the whole site! Eventually my hosting provider worked out
a “work-around”, but it has been another huge learning curve for me that has taken
weeks.
Although I initially thought AFB had gone down in the Jacobs River, and our team spent many a trip in there searching the area to no avail, after Robin Fautley came up with an 8mm video his parents had taken of a flight by Chadwick on the 20th January 1962. (1962 Footage Download Link) After viewing it many times, I realised I had been considering the way Chadwick flew as to what we do today. In 1962 he didn’t have the benefit of learning from other’s mistakes as he was in effect one of the pioneers in close encounter mountain flying. We are taught to take far less risks than what he took in those days, as to be frank, he didn’t know better. Due to pilots like him that have lost their lives in the mountains, we now know much better mountain flying techniques. The “Jacobs River” thory is now a thing in the past, but it needed to be eliminated before we could move on... It was just a “stepping stone” needed to be ‘stepped on’ to get further towards the end of this mystery.
Much of what is shown in the movie is not so much as what is seen, but what is not seen.As an example: 8mm celluloid was expensive and rather time consuming due to the process of developing it, so scenery that could be filmed anywhere in the World such as above cloud would not be filmed. Hence large gaps in the footage such as from the western side of Mt Cook down to Waita River (6 miles north of Haast) were pretty obviously not filmed due to that reason. The footage in the Haast area shows patchy cloud below them adding to this belief. The footage of Robin as a teenager, if you look closely, shows total white-out in the windows and probably why his mother took the time out from the scenery to film him.
Applying this new found knowledge, I then had another look at Peter Polson’s sighting... one of the best in the whole South Island.
I have spent many years examining many eyewitness accounts of Cessna 210 VH-MDX that disappeared in Australia in 1981, and although there has been massive searches for that one every year since, it has eluded everyone.
However I gained a lot of experience of understanding how the memory works and common mistakes often made... and one of them is pretty common... getting east and west mixed up. (Click here for two examples - read page 56 to 58) Peter Polson’s sighting always bothered me as if you believed his observation in the Official Report of seeing it fly SW pretty much right over the top of him, then for his claim given on his death bed of seeing it fly INTO the Jacobs River Valley, then he had to have seen it twice....
.. And then it became obvious...
He saw it fly in the direction of SE (not SW) and if you place this direction on Google Earth, it takes you directly into the Jacobs, exactly as he claimed on his death bed!
This now starts to make more sense. The two ladies out at Hunts Beach heard aeroplane motors “turning on and off” (obviously circling) and after personally observing Chadwick’s flying habits via the 8mm movie, it now becomes obvious. He wasn’t descending down through a hole in the cloud as I originally thouht, but instead was ascending up through one!
