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
You can easily see by this image that the only possibility out of the three radials
is that of the Mt Sandon VOR. I tried these calculations using lower speed winds,
and I found that the only way you could make the distance travelled to fit to the
Williamtown radial was with a wind speed of 30 knots, but then this position was
too far south to fit to any calculations from the position SW of Taree up to that
radial; i.e. the slower the velocity of the headwind – the further north the interception
point on the Williamtown radial for the leg up to the radial.
You can also see that with a 60 knot or stronger wind it is not possible to cover
the distance - so the wind couldn't have been that strong – although I think as a
result of these calculations to date - it was not that far off it (between 50 to
about 57 knots).
There was the belief that the turbulence was so bad through this area that Mike had
slowed the plane down, but if he had done that it would make it even more impossible
to transverse this section (radial to Ident) in the time it took them. It is apparent
that he was in a hurry to get these passengers home as he was expected back in Proserpine
the next day to pick up the owner of the aircraft who just happened to be also his
boss… talk about pressure!
I plotted all these calculations using the correct wind/drift/speeds for each 10°increments
to the Ident position over this range. From there it was just a matter of plotting
the distance and Ground Speed needed to cover the distance from where MDX was when
it turned back towards RP Craven (from below Taree) and I did this using the known
time it took to get to this radial (22 mins) and ground speeds of 120 kts (as per
the 40 kt winds used on the Flight Plan) and to allow for extra headwind – 100 kts.
For example, 22 minutes at 100 kts = 36.66 nm, and 22 minutes at 120 kts = 44 nm.
