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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