Accidents in PNG
G'day Storchpilot,
As far as I know there was only one C206 which crashed on climb at Garaina in 1974, so I am passing on my knowledge on that basis. I was en route Menyamya to Lae when flight service called and asked me to divert to Garaina to help locate a C206 (forgotten the callsign) which had crashed north of and close to the field.
On arrival there was smoke coming from the bush just north of the field over which I circled for about thirty minutes until an aircraft (I think a Crowley Aztec) arrived with a first aid kit to air drop on the site. At no stage could I identify what the smoke was coming from, but it had diminished to almost nothing when the Aztec arrived, and later proved to be from the C206.
We learned later from DCA, and I have no reason to doubt this, that the C206 had the flaps stuck at full flaps, and rather than wait for an engineer to fix it the pilot decided to fly back to Lae with full flap. This info came from a would be passenger waiting at Garaina to go to Lae who declined to get a lift due to the malfunction.
The pilot was the only POB and died in the crash.