More from my probably never to be published recollections of PNG flying.
, ...the Highlands of New Guinea presented some of the most demanding and challenging flying conditions likely to be encountered anywhere in the world. A deadly combination of very high, incredibly rugged terrain and treacherous weather that could deteriorate dramatically quite literally within minutes had led to the deaths of very many pilots over the years since aircraft had first started operating in the New Guinea Highlands before World War Two in support of the large gold discoveries in the area around Wau and Bulolo.
The country was so liberally littered with aircraft wrecks that pilots sometimes navigated from crash site to crash site as they made their way from one remote destination to another. To make life easier for searchers looking for a newly crashed aircraft, known wrecks were marked with large yellow crosses, and despite the very large number of known wrecks, in 1972 there were still over one thousand(!) crashed Allied aircraft scattered about the country that had never been located. That’s 1,000 Allied aircraft and does not include an unknown but large number of Japanese aircraft that never returned to their bases, many more of them lost, (just as it was for the Americans and the Australians during World War 2), to the weather and mechanical failure rather than to enemy action.