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
terrain in the area to escape the valley, they would have flown into the lee of Big
Lousy Mountain and of course in those strong westerly winds at the time, they would
have encountered a very strong down-draft and very turbulent conditions making it
near on impossible to clear the range.
Now take the Report/Observation of what appears to have been flares that Bette Diver
and her daughter saw that night:
Bette was driving over the bridge at Glenwilliam
at approximately 10 pm when she saw a white light over the mountains North West of
Dungog. Her daughter Lyn was lying asleep next to her.She woke her daughter up and
said did you see that. The white light seemed to stay up in the sky and then slowly
drop and then seemed to "fold into itself". She turned onto Alison Road where she
could get a clearer view of the night sky, when she and her daughter saw the second
white light do exactly the same as the first light.
Note the time they saw it and
compare that to the time I estimated MDX to be in that area (in my article 24 Dec
2020), and also note the direction they saw it.
Bette’s daughter a few years ago took a compass bearing using her cellphone compass
from her home. A cell phone compass has a default setting of “True” rather than Magnetic
to make it easy to relate it to that on a map, as maps are printed in “True”. Hence
the default True heading in plotting the direction on Google Earth can easily be
used also.
As I don’t know for sure the precise position of where Bette’s daughter
took this bearing (only that it was from her home), I have placed this direction
on GE as taken from either end of the road that I know she lives on, but I am told
the western extent is most likely the correct one. 
Blue Track: Original high level
Red
Track: Low level
Green Line: Wind Direction West to East
Red
Lines: Bette Diver’s daughter’s compass bearing.
This would then place the initial area needing to be searched within the blue enclosure
area:
