The Fiordland Triangle: Why so many aircraft have gone down

Monday, 18 January 2021

Flying above the Fiordland canopy, searching for a crashed Squirrel Helicopter, search and rescue member Stewart Burnby​ couldn't see a single trace.

There was no hole in the trees where the helicopter had plummeted through, no smoke, no debris. The Fiordland bush looked unscathed.

It wasn’t until the winchman went down through the bush that he could confirm the wreckage was definitely there.

And there was just one canopy branch broken to prove it had gone down into the bush.

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Fiordland is one of the most picturesque places in the country, but it is also one of the most unpredictable for weather changing rapidly.

Since 1936, there have been dozens of aircraft go down in the area. Some still remain lost to nature in the dense bush of the national park or high in the mountain peaks.

The bush in Fiordland National Park does not give up its secrets easily.

“You don’t get many second chances in Fiordland,” Burnby said.

Burnby, who has been involved in many searches during the years, recalls how he found another wreckage by chance.

About 12 years ago, he was returning from washing his hands in the Light River, at the head of Sutherland’s Sound, after shooting a deer, when he kicked a stick that made a clunk.

“I thought ‘that's not right’. It was a piece of aluminium off an aircraft of some sort. The first thing that crossed my mind was holy heck, I wonder if this is part of the aircraft that went missing – I think there was a priest flying it.”

In 1978, Father Syril Crosbie​ and three of his Riversdale mates went missing on their way back from a hunting and fishing trip to Big Bay. Twice that day the Cessna aircraft they were in had been turned back by weather, but they tried a third time.

Despite more than 550 hours of aerial searches over almost 650,000 square kilometres, no trace of the Crosbie plane has been found.

The wreckage Burnby found didn’t belong to Crosbie, but after he pulled it out of the bush he discovered it was a helicopter that had gone missing in the 1970s “Deer Wars”.

“It was just a piece that had fallen off … but the locals that know about those sorts of things. I saw this and thought I'd better take it out just in case it’s an aircraft, we might have stumbled on something.”

It paid to give things like that a second thought because it could be the discovery of a lifetime, he said.

And, no-one knows that better than Chris Montgomerie​, who remembers well the day she got the call that the wreckage of her brother’s helicopter had been found in Fiordland.

Campbell Montgomerie​ and his girlfriend Hannah Timings​ went missing in 2004, when the helicopter he was flying in went down in the Hollyford Valley.

Eight years later in 2012, helicopter pilot Brendan Hiatt​ spotted parts of the helicopter among rocks and scrub just above the snowline.

These days, Hiatt works for the Nelson Marlborough Rescue Helicopter​.

He was working in the Routeburn Valley the day the helicopter disappeared and followed the subsequent searches closely.

“There were a couple of times I thought I'd seen glimpses of something before, so I’d turned around to find it was just a rock with a bit of water, or rubbish.”

The flying conditions in Fiordland were comparable to Hong Kong and Indonesia, where he has also worked, he said.

“You need to be mentored into an environment like that, for sure.”

After Hiatt reported his find, search and rescue specialists were flown by helicopter to the foot of three sheer rock faces, at an altitude of 1340 metres, just above where the first traces of the wreckage was found.

“I remember at the time [when the wreckage was found], it was a blessing and a curse, because it gave you the closure, but it did reopen old wounds,” Montgomerie said.

The pilots who did the initial search for her brother, and had still been looking, were there to greet her parents, who travelled to Fiordland after he was found.

“It bugged them [the pilots] … the fact that they hadn’t found them, so they were constantly keeping their eyes open for anything.”

Montgomerie believes that part of her brother will forever be in Fiordland. His heart was already there, she said.

“I still think about him every day. Big family milestones, he’s still with us. You’d always think ‘what would Cam think?’ or ‘what would Cam do?’.”

But other families are not so lucky.

Filmmaker Bobby Reeve​ and his family have been searching for the wreckage of a missing Dragonfly since 2008.

Most summers they tramp into the Huxley River, on the South Islands Main Divide.

The plane went missing in 1962 while on a scenic flight from Christchurch to Milford Sound.

Reeve had met the pilot several years earlier when he sold his boat.

While no-one is exactly sure where the plane went down, Reeve has ruled out Milford Sound.

Talking to witnesses that saw the plane at the time, and his discovery of a woman’s fashion boot in a remote location in the area, which he believes belongs to one of the plane’s occupants, has led him to believe they are on the right track.

“[Initially] we grid searched the whole of the main Huxley [valley] … my two sons and I would start off in the morning, we’d climb up to about 4000ft, have lunch, have a rest, and then in the afternoon we’d come down, spread out – we had radios between us, we had GPS, and we’d come down, piece by piece, back to the creek. We did that all the way along the faces.”

The Reeve family are planning their next trip into the Huxley in the last week of February to search the river beds for up to six weeks.

In his more than 50 years of flying experience in 20 different countries, Te Anau-based pilot Rod Hall-Jones​ says there is nowhere in the world quite like Fiordland because of its weather and mountainous terrain.

“It’s very easy for a young pilot to get caught out. For a pilot that has had no mountain flying experience, it’s very easy to become disorientated and you can get lost there,” Hall-Jones said.

Fast-moving weather patterns that bring in cloud and fog can force them below the mountain tops and into the valley, which eventually comes to a dead end.

This is where a pilot’s mind can start to play tricks.

“For instance, you might get down in the valleys and you’ll tend to fly the aeroplane or helicopter a certain height above the valley. But as you are going up the valley, [it] will probably be sloping upwards and unconsciously you will be coming back on the control stick in order to keep that height above the valley floor, which means your speed is going to be reduced.”

A decrease in airspeed will trigger a warning that the aircraft is about to stall, which will cause the pilot to turn, resulting in the aircraft stalling while spinning, straight into the ground, Hall-Jones says.

“Quite a number of the aeroplane accidents are in good weather, with no wind in the mountains, for that very reason.”

While training pilots, he often found they would be convinced they were heading south when in reality they were heading north.

“It can definitely play with your senses. They’d say there must be something wrong with the compass. ”

Nowadays, pilots carry beacons and TracPlus, a real-time tracking and messaging system that is able to notify others of an aircraft’s whereabouts, so the chances of finding a downed aircraft are much higher than those without.

It gave a pretty good idea, within a radius, where a crash site might be, Burnby said.

While an aircraft could disappear through the Fiordland canopy without leaving a trail, they were always looking for those still missing, he said.

TIMELINE OF SOME FIORDLAND AIRCRAFT CRASHES:

December 30, 1936: Fox Moth cabin plane crashed at Big Bay​, one died, five injured.

February 12, 1962: De Havilland DH.90 Dragonfly​ disappeared between Christchurch and Milford, five assumed dead.

April 22, 1964: De Havilland DH.89 Dragon Rapide​ crashed on take off at Milford Sound, three injured.

August 16, 1978: Cessna-180​ disappeared after fishing trip at Big Bay, four assumed dead.

August 8, 1989: Britten-Normander Islander​ crashed at altitude of 5400ft in Milford Sound, 10 dead.

December 30, 1989: Two Cessnas​ collided over Milford Sound. One crashed, killing seven, the other landed safely.

November 1, 1990: Hughes 369D ZK-Hop​ crashed in Fiordland National Park, 4km east of Lake Widgeon, two dead.

April 18, 1999: Cessna 206 floatplane​ crashed into top of craggy mountain ridge of Mount Suter in Fiordland, five dead.

March 28, 2000: Hughes 369FF helicopter​ crashed after it struck powerlines at West Arm, Lake Manapouri, five dead.

January 19, 2002: Air Fiordland single-engine Cessna 207​ crashed into the slope of the Gertrude Saddle, six dead.

January 4, 2004: Hughes 500 helicopter​ crashed in Hollyford Valley, two dead.

December 15, 2013: Hughes 369E helicopter​ crash Gladeburn Valley, near the Milford Track, one dead.

August 4, 2017: Light aircraft​ at Martins Bay, blew off runway, no deaths.