Lost over the South Pacific
 

Tried a search, but couldn't find this one anywhere.

Years ago I read a very interesting story of a C208 lost on a ferry flight heading towards an island in the Sth Pacific.
He called on 121.5, and was lucky enough to make contact with a DC10. He explained the situation (this is all pre GPS days)..and the Capt of the DC10 'roughly established the position of the C208 by asking the pilot of the C208 to stretch his arm out in front of himself and ask how many finger-widths between the horizon and the sun (which was toward setting). From this info, the DC10 crew ball-parked the pos of the C208, gave him a direction to steer, and just after sunset, the C208 pilot saw lights of an island on the horizon. He subsequently landed on vapour.

I read this article in a book about 13 years ago, and with all the moves with the job over those years, I have lost that book..or probably loaned it to a pilot and you know what they're like at returning things.....

Any ideas people...a great read if you find it..

"Biggles Saves a Caravan" by Capt W E Johns? :}

I had a rather primitive by today's standard, Walker Sat-Nav GPS in 1981, when satellite passes occurred at time intervals of around 20 minutes.

First flight of the Caravan prototype occurred on December 9 1982, FAA certification was granted in October 1984 and production commenced in 1985 with first deliveries late that year.

The forerunner of the Garmin 100 (the original manufacturer's name alludes me) probably pre dated the first Caravan ferry flight.

Woomera

Wasn't the yarn about the C188 pilot on the ferry trip through Hawaii to oz was it?

The captain of the Air NZ Jet was Gordon Vette, from memory, and he wrote an excellent book, IMHO, on the Erebus tragedy.

The Cessna in question was indeed a C188, as Wiz pointed out, and there was a fairly ordinary movie made about it, the name of which eludes me.

sep

Mercy mission: The rescue of flight 771 (1993)

Starred a bloke named Scott Bakula who was in the TV show "quantum leap"

Not that movies are generally that accurate when it comes to anything related to aviation but that movie was the absolute pits.
Hopefully the book is better. Wouldn't be hard.:yuk:

BASI Article
 

....and I think this incident was also the subject of an article in one of the old BASI "crash comics"

There is a version of events in the book "Emergency! Crisis on the Flight Deck", by Stanley Stewart. It might be a compressed version of a full write-up somewhere else but its reasonably detailed.

Cheers

Lungs

Yers was a C188 agwagon, position plotted by Gordon Vettes and crew.
Them days a lot of airline pilots had Nav tickets as well.
Master Nav was awesome voodoo and arcane mumbo jumbo.

there was one movie about it called mercy mission, showed a 737 for the take off scene and a 767 for the rest, apparently the first officer on that flight was one of the guys killed in the erebus crash