Gavin Grimmer
I found there was a few problems with this Report:
1/ Davey Gunn drowned on Christmas Day 1955 in a river crossing accident – well before this disappearance!
2/ From this position of the fishing boat, it puts Big Bay 20 nautical miles away (over the horizon) and “the bush behind Big Bay” they couldn’t possibly see.
3/ To top this off, Mason (the Skipper) reported it was blowing a 25 – 30 knot SW wind.
Smoke in calm conditions normally only rises to around 1000 ft – 1500 ft and so in that wind - a lot less, so the smoke they saw was not from out the back of Big Bay.. simply impossible!
However giving Mason the benefit of the doubt, due to these reasons, any smoke he saw had to have been a lot closer.
4/ However that again then becomes more confusing as he said they steamed for three hours to get closer. Three hours ‘steaming’, with a 25 to 30 knot tailwind at say as little as 5 knots boat speed should have placed them at least at Big Bay, and if the smoke was closer (if it was still there after 3 hours?) then they would have steamed well past it’s position.
If Chadwick did in fact make it out to the coast, when it hit the “hard wind” as reported by the Skipper of “Miss
Geraldine”, then maybe the turbulence it would have encountered caused the main wing spar to break… remembering that it almost suffered that exact fate when Paul Beauchamp Legg was flying it across the ranges between Paraparaumu and Masterton? (Recorded in “LOST”)
So, as James Scott suggests, maybe this fire was ZK-AFB, and as a result there has not been a lot left to find....
Apart from the discrepancies mentioned a couple of slides back, maybe ZK-AFB did break up, and crash and burn there - as we can now show a logical reason for it being there?
As I pondered over this, I suddenly remembered… In March 2002, Dr Stanley Mulvaney, and tramping friends with him, saw from across a branch of the Kaipo Valley River (with the aid of binoculars) what appeared to be aircraft wreckage. At the time he told me of this, I thought that maybe it was melting moraine, but after seeing the possibility that maybe the Dragonfly made it this far then the possibility of it being wreckage is greatly increased? It was however late summertime (March) so possible wreckage can’t reasonably be discounted as being moraine. They had taken a compass bearing of this and sent me a copy of the map position of it via email in October 2008:
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