Anyone know anyone who was involved with this??
The C180 was a handy working aircraft, and many were used for crop dusting operations, In March 1958, an ag pilot working in New Zealand by the name of Don Erceg dropped his usual C180 into maintenance and picked up another. Something didn’t feel right, so Erceg returned and invited an engineer to join him so they could figure out the problem. The pilot put the aircraft through a series of manoeuvres hoping to demonstrate the ‘strange’ feeling to the engineer. Despite some increasingly aggressive moves the engineer couldn’t feel what this highly tuned ag pilots backside was telling him, not even as he took it through inverted! Erceg dropped off the engineer and returned to work. A couple of days later, while positioning the aircraft after a day’s top dressing the pilot felt a severe vibration followed almost immediately by silence. The aircraft stabilised in inverted flight and it is said that Erceg grabbed the only control he hadn’t so far tried, the flap handle. This somehow righted the aircraft and it fluttered to the ground where Erceg climbed out discovering that the engine had departed the airframe damaging the starboard strut and landing gear on the way. Erceg walked to a cattle station and called the engineer, telling him that the engine was missing. The engineer offered to send a mechanic with some fresh spark plugs but he soon realised that the engine was missing from the airframe! Three days later after some remedial work, ZK-BQJ took off from the field and was ferried to maintenance for some rather more substantial work.