Gavin Grimmer
One by Hal Moloney:
“I was in Craven the morning after the plane disappeared and spoke to _____ at the Craven Post Office and she claimed the plane passed over Craven with what sounded like engine trouble and was heading toward the Stroud Mountain area”
As previously mentioned, there were other reports that I heard of during my recent visit to the area, (also north of Stroud) of farmers hearing, and even seeing a plane fly over very low in an easterly direction.
The direction of where this plane came from is yet to be determined as I feel the direction is very important in determining where it went.
I contacted Leah Mullin over the “Nebo” sighting and while we were ‘talking’ on Messenger, I was placing on Google Earth an arrow indicating the direction of where the “Father and Son” were reported to have seen this plane come from to where it was seen going, and an arrow from where the woman at Nebo had seen it come from - towards where she was, and noted they both lined up.... and then I suddenly noticed that I had a red line already on Google Earth going in almost the same direction.
I zoomed out on GE to see what this red line was and was absolutely astounded to see that it was the radial that I had plotted from Mt Sandon through the Craven waypoint!!!!
Imagine that.... I had no other Placemarks or other information showing on Google Earth at the time... just this radial! I was so overwhelmed with this discovery, that I barely slept that night... The implications of this was simply overwhelming!
If Mike had in fact turned on this radial, this was proof that they did not crash at, or near the 5000 ft point....
The irony is... although this was what appeared to be an incredible discovery, this may not be correct... although it still has a bearing on things... more later!
Matthew Hoy has been in contact now for several years, and I have found him to be
a genuine, well meaning person who has a very keen interest in finding MDX.
He has
often run his Flight Simulator program attempting to verify my calculations on the
track of MDX from Taree up to the place where they were identified on, but has had
difficulty achieving this due to what appears to be a misunderstanding of some of
the principles of Navigation.
With great reluctance, I was racking my brains to see
if I could work out a simple way to explain it to him certain aspects, but came to
the realisation that the only way was to start from scratch again to make sure I
had my facts right.
I went back to Mike’s Flight Plan to get the information that he had calculated for it, and I noted the distances on it - Taree to Craven, and Craven to Singleton, but found it strange that these distances did not correspond to the distances to the waypoint “Craven”.
Let me explain here that as long as MDX has been discussed on the various blog sites on the Net and various documented articles, there has been quite a discussion as to whether Mike was using the township of Craven to navigate to, or to that as printed on the IFR chart as the “Craven” waypoint - which is further to the West of the township. From my own point of view, I had come to the conclusion that he was using the “Craven” waypoint.... not the township... and most of my research was based on this.
You can only now imagine my dismay when I noted the distance between Taree and waypoint
“Craven” shown on the IFR chart was 41 nm, and “Craven” to Singleton as 37 nm, yet
on his Flight Plan he had written “Taree - Craven 33 nm / Craven - Singleton 41 nm”.
When
I measured this distance on Google Earth, as expected, these distances did not line
up with the “Craven” waypoint at all, but did line up with the township! (Using the
NDB transmitter positions at Taree and Singleton).
The only difference in this is that according to GE, the distance between Craven township and Singleton NDB is 42 nm (1 nm out) but this is an easy mistake to make for reasons I wont get into here, but 1 nm in this sort of navigation wouldn’t make any difference in the outcome anyway.
The more I thought about this, the more it made sense.
Take for instance this statement found in the NAA files:
MDX pg 35