THE NELSON MAIL Saturday, March 16, 2013 —
Weekend
www.nelsonmail.co.nz
Search area: A Google Earth map of the Land Search and Rescue search segments for the lost plane Aotearoa, in an operation over the weekend of March 9, this year.
Somewhere in the Golden Bay bush lies a mystery and a legend, and potentially the key to a piece of aviation history. Naomi Arnold joins the search for the Aotearoa.
L
ike they did most mornings of the school holidays, Rex Lankshear and Donald Hadfield woke at dawn that day to head out into the hills around Awaroa. The cousins spent most of the summer time roaming their playground. Sometimes they’d disappear for days, and when they camped out they’d raise a flag up a manuka pole on the hill above the farm. Bill Hadfield, Donald’s father, would get out his binoculars and see the boys were safe. Looking back, Mr Lankshear can’t remember exactly what year it was – January of 1962 or 1963. But he recalls vividly what happened that day. The teenagers took their knives and the dog and left the farm in search of pigs, walking across the beach and up the hills into the scrub. When they heard the dog was on to something they took off, across Awaroa Rd, and down a slope. They raced past a structure in a clump of skinny manuka, and Mr Lankshear remembers thinking: ‘‘What the bloody hell is that?’’’ The dog had the pig bailed up in the scrubby gully below. They stuck it, cleaned it up , and cut off its hind legs, and then walked back up the slope for a closer look at what he’d seen. It was a pipe frame, several metres long, with sticks of manuka growing up through it. At first, they thought it was an old windmill. But Rex had grown up near Nelson’s airport. He’d seen the planes there after the war and knew what aeroplane bodies looked like. This had no wings, no engine, no propeller, no tail – but it was a piece off a plane, all right. That night at dinner, Rex told his uncle Bill what they’d seen. Mr Hadfield was dubious – until he talked to his own father, Fred, who used to do the mail run from Totaranui to Awaroa and rode around to the farm on horseback every Sunday. Fred mentioned a conversation he’d had with Jimmy Perrott, a runaway sailor who had jumped ship aged 14, near the turn of the century. He lived in a whare at nearby Silver Point, and was by then an old man. But he told Fred Hadfield that he’d seen something like that too. After he left the farm that summer, Rex forgot about the plane. A few years later, Donald died of cyanide poisoning when he was making up possum baits in the woolshed. Rex, by that time 17 and living in Nelson, couldn’t bring himself to go to his funeral. ‘‘It hit me pretty hard,’’ he says. There was no reason to ever mention the plane again; it never came up. Mr Lankshear became an engineer, married, raised children, and established Reco Wrought Iron in Brightwater. It wasn’t until about 2003, when he and employee Steve Newport were yarning at smoko, that Mr Lankshear mentioned what he and Donald had seen that day. Mr Newport told his engineer brother Mark, and the pair spent the next few years tramping the hills and gullies of Awaroa, making seven or eight separate searches. They found marijuana plots, beer
Hunt for the
Aotearoa Strange find: Rex Lankshear, a pig hunter in his youth, spied a wreckage in the hills near Awaroa in the Abel Tasman. Many believe it is the Aotearoa. Photo: WAIKATO TIMES
Richmond, Sydney, to Trentham Racecourse in Wellington, planning to cross Farewell Spit and follow the coastline, then hop across the Strait. The 2335km flight was expected to take 14 hours in the Ryan B-1 Brougham monoplane made largely of wood; the only metal part was a thin pipe frame that went around the engine and contained the seats. There was no navigational equipment – just a radio, which would automatically send out a long dash for five minutes every quarter of an hour. Hood had lost his lower right leg in a previous crash, and the position of an extra fuel tank meant it would have been impossible for the pair to change places during the flight. By late afternoon on January 10, about 10,000 people had joined Laura
‘‘It was bloody identical . . . I think he found a framework, and it would’ve had to have come from the sky. He’s a nice bloke. There’s absolutely no reason for him to invent anything.’’ Sherp Tucker
Spotted something: Rex Lankshear, left, and Donald Hadfield at the Hadfield Farm in Awaroa, January 1965. cans, and old fence posts, but no plane. After a few years, they figured they’d better tell someone, so in September 2011 Mark Newport told Andrew Mackie, a keen aviation enthusiast – and Mr Mackie felt a chill of recognition.
B
y then it was almost 75 years since Australian aviator Charles Kingsford Smith and Charles Ulm flew the Southern Cross in the first trans-Tasman crossing, landing in Wigram, Christchurch, on September 11, 1928.
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About 240km out from New Zealand, the Southern Cross crew dropped a wreath in memory of two New Zealanders who had gone before them. Eight months earlier, Lieutenant John Moncrieff and Captain George Hood had attempted to fly the Aotearoa from
Hood and Dorothy Moncrieff at Trentham Racecourse with beacons of hay burning to guide the two men home. But at 5.22pm, the pips from the radio stopped, and the Evening Post of January 11 reported excruciating scenes from ‘‘the vain vigil at Trentham’’, which stretched into the dark. ‘‘After midnight the wives of the aviators [who] had been conspicuous by their brightness and cheery confidence, began to show some signs of strain, though by no means of despair,’’ it read. ‘‘It was at one in the morning that Mrs Moncrieff, so pluckily confident, looked at her wristlet watch for the hundredth time, and said simply: ‘Their petrol is out’.’’ Two days later, the Nelson Evening Mail reported a woman in Collingwood had heard a plane go over. Others waiting on Farewell Spit to welcome the
aviators saw and heard nothing. Although there were searches and reports of sightings up and down the country, no trace of the two men or their plane has ever been found. Suspecting the Newport boys had actually been on the hunt for the Aotearoa, Mr Mackie told Sherp Tucker, who was then Tasman Police District’s assistant search and rescue coordinator. He got Mr Lankshear into the office in late 2011 and asked him to draw what he’d seen on the whiteboard. Mr Lankshear began to outline a framework of thin metal tubing, lying on a slope in a clump of manuka. As the drawing took shape, Mr Tucker tried to hide his excitement. ‘‘It was bloody identical,’’ he says. ‘‘I think he found a framework, and it would’ve had to have come from the sky. He’s a nice bloke. There’s absolutely no reason for him to invent anything.’’ Although the area had been milled from the 1880s, by the 1930s the settlers had left. The land where the boys once roamed has never been farmed – no tractors, no ploughs, just the occasional clearance by fire – so there was little possibility of the structure being a farm windmill or an old piece of machinery. It was an excellent opportunity for a search, without the burden of knowing that every minute spent in reconnaissance might mean a life closer to death. During several interviews, Mr Tucker tried to pull memories out of Mr Lankshear’s head, like a strip of film. In the final chat before the search last weekend, Mr Tucker visited Mr Lankshear at home in Richmond and opened up two laptops on the coffee table. One screen showed an aerial photo of the area taken in 1965, the other a topographical map. At 66, Mr Lankshear has thick salt and pepper hair, skin as brown as a nut, and the blackened fingernails of a man who’s made his living with his hands. From his lounge he can see the bluish thumb of Separation Point on
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THE NELSON MAIL Saturday, March 16, 2013 —
3
NEWS
Search fails to answer aviation riddle Naomi Arnold naomi.arnold@nelsonmail.co.nz An 85-year-old aviation mystery remains unsolved after a search last weekend failed to find any trace of the plane that may have made the first flight across the Tasman Sea. But the searchers are determined to keep looking. Land Search and Rescue teams from Nelson, Motueka and Golden Bay spent last weekend combing through rough country in the hills near Awaroa Inlet, in Abel Tasman National Park. They were looking for what could be the fuselage of the Aotearoa, the modified Ryan B-1 Brougham high-wing monoplane that New Zealanders Lieutenant John Moncrieff and Captain George Hood flew from Sydney in the first trans-Tasman flight attempt, in January 1928. Moncrieff and Hood intended to make landfall at Farewell Spit and then fly to Wellington’s Trentham Racecourse. But the Aotearoa’s radio signal disappeared 12 hours after takeoff, when the plane should have been within about 300 kilometres of New Zealand. A 10,000-strong welcoming committee, including both men’s wives, were left waiting into the night at Trentham. Though there were many reported sightings of the aircraft at the time, land searches over the years found no trace of it. The latest search was part of a training exercise for Search and Rescue, but had real implications. If found, the remains would confirm that Moncrieff and Hood were the first aviators to make it across the Tasman, beating the successful flight of Australian Charles Kingsford Smith in the Southern Cross in September 1928. One of the searchers, Nelson
aviation historian Andrew Mackie, said it was New Zealand’s first aviation disaster. ‘‘If the wreckage were found, it would prove conclusively that they were the first to do it. We won’t give up until we find it.’’ Search and Rescue had been planning since September 2011, based on the memory of Richmond man Rex Lankshear, 66, who said he saw a fragment of plane wreckage in a clump of manuka while he and his cousin Donald Hadfield, since deceased, were hunting
at Awaroa in January 1962 or 1963. Mr Lankshear said the weekend had given him a renewed taste for the mystery, and he was keen to embark on his own research. ‘‘I’m going to go back. I’m determined now – I’m going to find it.’’ Former Tasman assistant SAR coordinator Sherp Tucker, who now works as a volunteer for SAR, had narrowed the search down to several areas, based on interviews with Mr Lankshear. Mr Tucker said he was disappointed that they didn’t find the
plane. In hindsight, he would have preferred several more days, to do a better search of the difficult country. ‘‘We like finding things, and I have absolutely no doubt there’s something there to find.’’ However, he said the weekend was an excellent training exercise. In the course of their interviews about the Aotearoa, six Land SAR people had received good training in handling distant memories ‘‘without putting things in people’s heads’’.
The search teams used an aerial photo from 1965 layered on to Google Earth so they could examine the area’s terrain and vegetation changes between then and now in three dimensions. ‘‘From an incident management point of view, the way we looked at the topography and how we used it on Google Earth is probably a first,’’ Mr Tucker said. ‘‘That really did work well.’’ Golden Bay Search and Rescue’s Graham Pomeroy, who was incident controller during the week-
App planned to help pronunciation Adam Roberts adamr@nelsonmail.co.nz A Nelson man looking to create an app to improve pronunciation is hoping supporters will put their money where their mouths are. Filmmaker Keith Hawke has started a crowd-sourcing campaign to raise funds to develop a mobile app aimed at people with English as a second language. The completed app would connect to an online database of words, and allow the user to type in words they are struggling to pronounce, hear
them read out with the correct pronunciation, then record their voice to compare the two. It would be available to download free, but advertising may be incorporated eventually. His pledge page at Indiegogo.com lists $28,000 in costs for production of the app, including $8000 for paying an ‘‘international broadcast voice’’ – documentary narrator Craig McLeod – to record the correct pronunciation for more than 100,000 words. So far two people have donated $50. The campaign closes on March 28,
and once it does Mr Hawke will receive all money donated, minus fees, according to the site’s conditions. Mr Hawke said the process had been slow, with a big learning curve, but he had heard from a lot of people who were enthusiastic about the project. ‘‘There’s a lot of verbal support, but not much money support yet.’’ In his career as a film-maker, he had dealt with a lot of people for whom English was a second language, and who struggled with the pronunciation of certain words. He had researched what was al-
ready on the market, and saw that there were complex apps designed by speech therapists and with many more features, but he wanted a simple app that could be free to anyone. He was convinced the app was a viable proposition and, if he did not get the funding, he would try to see whether he could get a better deal. ‘‘I have looked at doing this from a fully professional point of view. I’m reluctant to ask people to do things for nothing.’’
❚ Visit Keith Hawke’s pledge page at indiegogo.com/projects /englishpronunciation-app
Public offered experience of ‘Blitz St’ A theatre company will dramatise wartime life including a ‘‘Blitz Experience’’ as part of an Anzac commemoration at Nelson’s Founders Heritage Park. The Dramatix Theatre Development Trust plans to turn the Energy Centre into a ‘‘Blitz St’’ scene including experiencing a bombing raid in a public shelter. Organiser Tracey Ramsay said the Lest We Forget Anzac commemoration would offer visitors the opportunity to experience World War II history ‘‘in a very real, educational and unforgettable way’’. Nelson RSA is not involved in the event but president Barry Pont is happy with it. It starts with the Nelson Pine Industries Blitz Experience and other activities include the Nelson City Council Wall of Remembrance, the Network Tasman Pacific War Display showing the threat of Japanese invasion and the Anzacs who held the line. At the Cuts@Once Lyons Corner Cafe visitors can queue to purchase ration coupons then taste a variety of wartime cooking while at the OfficeMax Resistance Challenge participants’ mission is to deliver a message to their ‘‘contact’’. Last year the Lest We Forget event gave visitors a ‘‘Trench Experience’’. Ms Ramsay said she expected the Blitz Experience to have the same sort of impact where visitors commented that rather than their children knowing about war through film and video games, they realised that war was about people – ‘‘people being hurt, people dying’’. This time visitors could also experience ‘‘a wartime children’s carnival, siren, battle reenactments, wartime comedy, patrolling soldiers, child evacuees being tearfully farewelled, young men ‘joining up’ , white feathers being given by angry women to those they see as slackers – and more’’, she said. Mr Pont said the RSA opposed anything that glorified war.
end, said the planning was just like that for a normal search. ‘‘It was more realistic than any training we’ve ever done. You can not replicate what we did in training; these cold case searches are really good.’’ Mr Tucker said the GPS maps and search information would be available at the Golden Bay office for anyone who wanted to try to find the plane themselves. Upper Hutt’s Diane Moncrieff, the grand-niece of Lieutenant Moncrieff, said she admired those
Man missing for six days Nelson police are seeking information on the whereabouts of a man who hasn’t been heard of for six days. Jim Schierny, also known as Jim Tomas, was last seen on Sunday morning at about 7am when he left his St Vincent St home. Mr Schierny, 67, is of solid build and has a beard and moustache. He was last seen wearing a black and white checked shirt, blue jeans and black trainers. He wears glasses, and was most likely wearing a cap. He was on foot when he left home and his disappearance is out of character. Sergeant Matt Elliott said police were following up a suggestion that Mr Schierny might have taken some ‘‘time out’’ but were still concerned for his wellbeing, as were family members. Anyone who has seen him or knows of his whereabouts should contact police on 03 546 3840.
Towels spark fire in bar Nelson firefighters went to the Hangar 58 cafebar on the corner of New and Collingwood Sts early this morning when towels in a dryer caught fire. Two fire engines were sent at 1.30am. Firefighters wore breathing apparatus because of the acrid smoke but damage was confined to the first-floor dryer and its contents. The bar was closed when the fire began.
Children taken to hospital Four primary-aged children were taken to Nelson Hospital after a two-car crash in Wakefield yesterday afternoon. All had suffered minor injuries when the cars collided in Whitby Rd at 3pm. They were two girls aged seven and nine from Wakefield, an eight-year-old Wakefield boy and an eight-year-old Tapawera boy.
Spark may have started mill fire A second alarm callout at the Motueka Lumber Co mill on High St was likely to have been caused by something hard sparking as is went through a planing machiney, firefighters say. A spark ignited a pile of wood shavings, leading to a small fire at about 4.15pm on Thursday, said Motueka Volunteer Fire Brigade chief fire officer Mike Riddell. Although the fire itself was small, getting into the ducted flues leading from the enclosed planing room was tricky. Appliances from Mapua and Richmond joined the two Motueka appliances on the scene, bringing thermal imaging equipment to find the hot spots in the ducts and to allow firefighters wearing breathing apparatus to be rotated. Firefighters were on the scene for about two hours. Fire damage was minimal but some damage was caused getting into the ceiling and walls of the double-lined sound-proofed plane room, he said. In the mud: Nyge Rimmer as a Great War soldier in last year’s Trench Experience. Photo: MARTIN DE RUYTER/FAIRFAX NZ
He acknowledged there was a fine line between entertainment and education. ‘‘We find it educational because the younger take it in more than reading it in books.’’ Lest We Forget is run by volunteers and is now in its sixth year. Ms Ramsay said thousands went to it each year. The re-enactment event will run on April 20, 21 and 25, and a school education programme will be held from April 15 to 19.
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who embarked on the search, but was doubtful they would find the Aotearoa after such a long time. ‘‘Good on them,’’ she said. ‘‘I think it’s wonderful that they’re doing it. ‘‘You always have that feeling deep down that you’d love them to find something to prove that [Moncrieff and Hood] did do it. But all these years later, you have to be a little bit sceptical.’’ ❚ Naomi Arnold travelled to Awaroa last weekend to join the search for the Aotearoa. Her report, p11.