Another missing plane…

A plane gone missing. Days and weeks without a sighting. Distraught relatives. Confusion about the possible route. Media speculation. Misleading government announcements. Searches in the wrong area.

Sound familiar? These words could be about MH370, the missing Malaysian Airlines plane, but they could just as well apply to numerous other aviation mysteries across the world since the Wright Brothers lifted the Flyer off the ground in 1903. For instance, there are intriguing parallels between the disappearance of MH370 and that of the pioneer Australian aviator, Bert Hinkler, in a Puss Moth in 1933, as you will see in the story below.

For 40 minutes he sat in the cockpit and waited. In the blink of an eye the mist disappeared as quickly as it had drifted across, and he immediately opened the throttle. It was 3:10am on Saturday 7 January 1933.

In the muted yellow light from car headlights, the de Havilland Puss Moth roared down the strip at London’s Great West aerodrome and into the air. The watchers on the ground saw the plane caught momentarily in a shimmer of moonlight, like the flash of a silvery fish in a stream, then it was gone. Bert Hinkler was on his way to Australia. Again.

But he quickly disappeared into another mist – a mist of uncertainty, anxiety and confusion. In the next 24 hours, there was no word of him, not from Italy, not from Greece, not even from nearby France.

Where could he be? Had he crashed, had he made an emergency landing, had he gone down on land or in the sea?

Silence. No one was quite sure where to look for Hinkler. Or even whether they should. Which way had he gone? Did he make it across the Channel? Was he really flying to Australia? Perhaps he’d force-landed at a remote airstrip without communication facilities? Or he’d gone down in the sea and been picked up by a passing ship?

Days passed with no contact.

On January 10, three days after take-off, there was no longer a chance he’d landed at an isolated airstrip and continued on. Although the Australian Air Liaison Officer in London discussed Hinkler’s disappearance with the British Air Ministry on 11 January, no official request for a search was made because, the Ministry said, they didn’t know if he’d come down on French, Greek, Italian or Swiss territory or crashed into the sea.

An English solicitor, Leslie Pearkes, said to be representing Hinkler, released an itinerary to the Press, which indicated the first stopover was to have been either Brindisi in Italy or Athens in Greece, depending on the weather, the state of the engine, and how Hinkler was feeling. Although British Civil Aviation officials had a similar schedule, they speculated he may have tried for the London-Cape Town record.

As happens when there is no information, the Press also began to speculate. One newspaper said Hinkler was prone to making statements that cloaked his real intentions, that his plan had been to fly to Australia in five days, and that he’d said the result of the first day’s flying would decide his subsequent plans. The paper claimed that Hinkler had once indicated a more leisurely trip ‘including acceptance of a long-standing invitation to spend three days shooting in India’.

A New York newspaper reported there was little anxiety about Hinkler’s absence after four days because he had ‘a known penchant for conducting his flights with as little publicity as possible’.

The Mayor of Bundaberg said he deplored the delay in mounting a search when the oil companies who laid down supplies in advance must have known about his route and therefore that he hadn’t arrived. The Shell-Mex Company, which was providing his fuel supplies, initially said it was bound to secrecy, but four days after his disappearance released an itinerary that was the same as the one announced by Pearkes.

The Daily Mail lamented the “…amazing position when no one in England is prepared to take the responsibility of inaugurating a search, as Mr Hinkler has no financial backers and is using his own machine.”

In Italy, the Air Ministry issued an alert to all airfields, asking pilots to keep a lookout, but pointed out that if he crashed in the Alps he might not be found for a long time, citing a recent example of an Italian pilot not found for two months.

Inevitably there were reports of sightings and suspected sightings on the day he disappeared: over the English county of Kent, over France, over Switzerland.

A particularly promising report came from Monsieur M. Saby, Inspector of Waterways and Forests at Sens, about 60 miles south-east of Paris, who had heard an aircraft overhead on the morning of Hinkler’s departure, and on learning of the airman’s disappearance had tracked a plane via informants across his district. He was convinced Hinkler’s plane had come down in the rugged Monts du Morvan area.

A week or so after the Australian’s disappearance, in England the self-appointed ‘Hinkler Search Committee’ organised a search in Switzerland by a respected British flyer, the appropriately named Captain Wally Hope. A photographer travelling with Hope wrote an account for a London newspaper of their travails in Switzerland searching unsuccessfully for ‘the boy from Bundaberg’, a report that was later found to be false.

A more thorough investigation, by the tenacious Monsieur Saby, yielded nothing, and no other significant searches were conducted.
On 13 January, six days after Hinkler had taken off, the British Broadcasting Commission sent a message asking national broadcasters throughout Europe to seek information from listeners about possible sightings. To no avail.

Speculation continued. The aeronautical correspondent of London’s Morning Post said, “It was Hinkler’s deliberate intention to keep his plans secret, and when I spoke to him about the flight shortly before he left, he said that although he hoped to break all records for the route by a substantial margin, he proposed to say as little as possible until he had actually accomplished something.”

At the end of March, almost twelve weeks after Hinkler disappeared, Hinkler’s de facto wife, Nance, said: “I cannot believe that my husband is lost until I have absolute proof. I still hope and believe that when the snows of the Alps melt after the winter, it will be found that he is safe in some snow-bound place in the mountains.”

On 21st April, 1933, solicitor Pearkes declared his intention to make an early application to the court to presume death.

Six days later, 25-year-old Gino Tocchioni was making his way down a spur of Tuscany’s Pratomagno range in Italy’s Arezzo province. His eyes were peeled for timber he could burn and sell as charcoal, and he was thankful for the warmth of the spring sun, because it meant the snows had melted on the lower slopes, revealing vegetation that had been hidden during the winter months.

Intrigued by a flash of white on a ridge higher up, Tocchioni clambered towards it. Shortly afterwards, among a scattering of beech trees, on the sloping side of the mountain, he found the wreckage of a small silver plane with red markings.

The machine was a crumpled mass, like a tin shed that had been flattened by a cyclone. Its frame was contorted, as if a giant had grown angry with his toy, and twisted it in his hands before dashing it to the ground. Various personal items were strewn around the site, and higher up the slope a detached wing lay forlornly.

Some 80 yards from the wrecked plane, in a grassy area sheltered by a juniper bush, the Italian discovered the body of the pilot, lying on his back and clad in a torn suit and flying jacket. Tocchioni and another charcoal burner, Raffaello Cari, headed down the mountainside to alert the local carabinieri.

A police party arrived at the site early the next day. Taking care not to disturb the body unduly, they found a passport which identified the pilot as Herbert John Louis Hinkler, born at Bundaberg, Australia.

After three long months, the missing pilot and his plane had been found.

[This is an edited extract from the biography, Hustling Hinkler: the short tumultuous life of a trailblazing aviator, by D R Dymock, Hachette Australia, 2013.]

Hustling Hinkler: the short tumultuous life of a trailblazing aviator is available for $27.95 via Booktopia.