Search map for missing aviators George Hood & John Moncrieff (1928)

On 10 January 1928, George Hood and John Moncrieff took off from Sydney in their monoplane ‘Aotearoa’. They were attempting to make the first ever flight across the Tasman Sea, which was expected to cover the 2335 km distance in around 14 hours. Sadly, they were never seen again.

As nzhistory.net.nz notes, “this attempt at aviation history captured the public’s attention. By late afternoon 10,000 people had joined Laura Hood and Dorothy Moncrieff at Trentham Racecourse (near Wellington) to welcome their husbands. They waited in vain.” At 17:22 NZ time, when the aircraft had been in the air for just over 12 hours, and should have been within about 200 miles of New Zealand, signals from the Aotearoa ceased abruptly.

There were many reports of supposed sightings of the aircraft during the evening and night of 10 to 11 January. Most claimed to see the lights of the ‘Aotearoa’, but the aircraft carried no navigation lights or flares. Some of the most apparently reliable sightings could be interpreted as the ‘Aotearoa’ making landfall north of the intended track near Cape Egmont, tracking along the Southern Taranaki coast, and then cutting across the South Taranaki Bight to the coast near Paekakariki, intending to round Cape Terawhiti and fly up Wellington Harbour to the Hutt Valley. This would have been a valid scenario if the aircraft had drifted north of its intended trans-Tasman course.

This map of New Zealand illustrates the search for the vanished plane. Starting on 11 January, air, sea and land searches were carried out for many days in the hope of finding the aviators alive at sea, or on a remote beach, or at least of finding some wreckage that might indicate their fate. The possible flight path of ‘Aotearoa’ and its assumed distance at the loss of radio contact is drawn in red, while the path of the search parties are also shown.

Many land searches have been made since then. Based on a number of supposed sightings, these have mostly focused on Mount Stokes (the highest point in the rugged bush-covered Marlborough Sounds). No evidence has ever been found of any wreckage, or any other trace of the aviators. A chance sighting of what may have been plane wreckage in dense bush near Totaranui in what is now Abel Tasman National Park by youths in the 1960s led to a full-scale search of the area in 2013. No wreckage was found.

Archives Reference: ABPV W3111 Box 1/1 archway.archives.govt.nz/ViewFullItem.do?code=20401539

Caption information from www.nzhistory.net.nz/page/pioneer-aviators-vanish-over-ta...

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