The story of Father Joe ploughing into a cliff face reminds me that things we have learned about later, were happening since we started flying aeroplanes.
On the sixth of February 1941 Frank Buchanan in UJO, a Hercules, failed to arrive in Wau from Salamaua.
OK…OK settle down!
The C130 wasn’t the first Hercules. Thissy was a Dh 66… a bloody great bridge like structure that got airborne against great odds by being dragged along by three 420 HP Bristol Jupiter engines connected to whopping two bladed wooden props.
VH-UJO had come from West Australian Airways and they had come up with a real neat, new, idea, when they ordered it from de Havillands. Could de H. enclose the cockpit so the pilots weren’t sitting out in the weather. It was possibly the first plane they ever bothered doing THAT to. The original 66s made for Imperial Airways had the pilots where they rightfully belonged… out freezing their nuts off.
The Herc, along with all the other Pommy aeroplanes wasn’t really suited to PNG operations, but the government weren’t breaking with mother England and wouldn’t allow real aeroplanes into the country and protectorates.
Dunnow how the Junkers got in but they certainly showed the string bags up for the antiquated relics that they were.
After an extensive search of four days, a glint of white was spotted through the trees and UJO was located.
I have coloured movie my uncle took as he circled the site and there’s not much to see other than a bit of white material..
They’d flown into the ground. That was a funny thing because Frank was a weary pilot near cloud. Didn’t like rock filled ones at all.
No one knew how he could have done it. Me old man’s mate, Doug Muir, had a theory.
The same day, a cold wind bore down the valley at Wau and flattened the Carpenter’s hangar, making a bit of a mess of a Dragon, Gannet and a Fox Moth.
Doug who was one Oz’s more famous but unheralded airmen and engineers reckoned it was that same wind that probably pushed Freddy into the trees.
In the eighties we learned all about downbursts and played flyin’ to stick shaker speed to combat one in the simulator.
Lotsa real big clouds in PNG… Met observed some at Moresby at seventy thousand feet on the Owen Stanlies one arvo in 1970.
I wonder how many downbursts we flew near and if some of those blokes we reckoned had been a bit too smart, crossing ridges with little to spare, had been squashed into them.