Gavin Grimmer
23 March 2011 - Another possibility?
I have always felt that one of the purposes for this site is to have as much information recorded as possible (within reason) on these missing aircraft so that everyone has access to that information.
What may appear as being of little importance to me, may be that piece of information that someone else needs to jog their memory.
In researching these missing aircraft, you need to always keep an open mind for all possibilities and to date I have been rather over focused looking for ZK-BMP in the site previously mentioned, due to a mark placed on a map by the pilot of where a passenger supposedly saw an aircraft in the bush.
The fact that we have had a total of three ground searches, by myself and others, in that area and we have found nothing which tends to lend weight that ZK-BMP is not there, the information I have is wrong, and the object shown in the aerial photo is just another cruel illusion!
So on that basis, I have been revisiting the information I have and looking for other possibilities.
The problem with the information is that it is derived from very distant memories of two people who are now in their 80’s. They have done very well as it’s hard to remember what happened a few months back, never-the-less 30 odd years ago!
Along with the pilot, Paul Legg, we have now determined the track they took using marks on the map that he used on the day, photos that they took, and once again what the pilot and the passenger remember, using common denominators from both of their accounts.
It also turns out that there was a misunderstanding on my part in that the mark that the pilot put on the map shown as a red circle was only put on there by him a couple of years or so ago as a way of trying to explain where he thought the downed aircraft was seen, and he did this by going by blue marks that he had placed on the map in September, 1980. Unfortunately, there were a total of four blue marks - three shown in the area of Lake McKerrow and one at the bottom east side of Lake Alabaster, so we can only assume that one of these marks are correct.
The black lines drawn in are tracks that Paul had marked on the map prior to the flight so that he could take alternative tracks in a hurry if the weather was not suitable, although you can only see a small portion of them here as the map has been zoomed in and cropped to make it easier to see.
These tracks have five nautical mile marks (one shown by the “k” in “Lake”) to make it easy to calculate how much time and distance to travel to the destination.
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