This Site is dedicated to all those families of the people that have tragically disappeared on flights in and around New Zealand. I only hope that from all the effort in building this site and from all the effort of those taking part in this venture, that it will bear fruit in bringing ‘closure’ to their memories!
Gavin Grimmer
Gavin Grimmer
that if ZK-AJV had ended up there in 1947, then it was, for whatever reason, no longer there and I couldn’t see what else we could do to try to locate her.
My thoughts were, that if one day we get hold of the right technology, (technology that we can use from below a helicopter) then it would be worth doing a run up this valley, just to be sure.
After my experience with the black-berry bushes, it occurred to me that maybe if the remains of ZK-AJV were still there, then they would most likely be somewhere under a blackberry bush. This would explain why no-one further had reported seeing it, even though there must have been quite a few people going all over this area when they were planting the Pine forest in the early 90’s. More people would have gone through there trimming the trees since then. No body would have bothered, or even been interested in checking out what was in amongst the black berries - they would have avoided them!
What we needed to do, was narrow the search area down to a much more defined area and then go in with slashers and clear the area.
Wednesday 24th November, 2010, saw me in at NZ Aerial Mapping again and it turned out that they had just overflown and filmed the area about a week before!
They very kindly supplied me with a very high resolution digital photo of the area I was interested in, and I overlaid it on Google Earth. With this up-to-date photo, I was now able to compare the landmarks between the 1949, 1962 and 2010 photos and discovered that quite a lot of the landmarks that I had been using for locating my position had changed!
I must point out at this stage, that we have found that the GPS has lots of difficulty getting a positive position fix in this area - especially when in close to the cliff faces. While we were having lunch, I placed my Garmin GPSmap 60CSx on the ground and left it in that one spot. After having lunch, when I picked it up, I was shocked to find that according to it, we had been walking all over the place! I have had other models in with us on the first trip and they were the same, if not worse.
Looking at such an up to date aerial photo was really great, as due to all the time we have spent in there, we can now recognize on the photo exactly where we were. We can easily find our way back to virtually any area we need to, easily.
After spending a lot of time comparing the different years of photos, I can now say that I now know exactly where the area that it was in shown on the 1947 photo is, and although we were close to where it was shown, we did not actually get to the right spot.
It is now just a case of waiting for a convenient time and good weather to get back in there again.
Maybe next week.........
My thoughts were, that if one day we get hold of the right technology, (technology that we can use from below a helicopter) then it would be worth doing a run up this valley, just to be sure.
After my experience with the black-berry bushes, it occurred to me that maybe if the remains of ZK-AJV were still there, then they would most likely be somewhere under a blackberry bush. This would explain why no-one further had reported seeing it, even though there must have been quite a few people going all over this area when they were planting the Pine forest in the early 90’s. More people would have gone through there trimming the trees since then. No body would have bothered, or even been interested in checking out what was in amongst the black berries - they would have avoided them!
What we needed to do, was narrow the search area down to a much more defined area and then go in with slashers and clear the area.
Wednesday 24th November, 2010, saw me in at NZ Aerial Mapping again and it turned out that they had just overflown and filmed the area about a week before!
They very kindly supplied me with a very high resolution digital photo of the area I was interested in, and I overlaid it on Google Earth. With this up-to-date photo, I was now able to compare the landmarks between the 1949, 1962 and 2010 photos and discovered that quite a lot of the landmarks that I had been using for locating my position had changed!
I must point out at this stage, that we have found that the GPS has lots of difficulty getting a positive position fix in this area - especially when in close to the cliff faces. While we were having lunch, I placed my Garmin GPSmap 60CSx on the ground and left it in that one spot. After having lunch, when I picked it up, I was shocked to find that according to it, we had been walking all over the place! I have had other models in with us on the first trip and they were the same, if not worse.
Looking at such an up to date aerial photo was really great, as due to all the time we have spent in there, we can now recognize on the photo exactly where we were. We can easily find our way back to virtually any area we need to, easily.
After spending a lot of time comparing the different years of photos, I can now say that I now know exactly where the area that it was in shown on the 1947 photo is, and although we were close to where it was shown, we did not actually get to the right spot.
It is now just a case of waiting for a convenient time and good weather to get back in there again.
Maybe next week.........
Read on for next trip in....
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